Communist Party history and political influence

¶ … Communist Party During the Stalin Period (1928 to 1953)

In order to examine the changes undergone by the Communist Party during the reign of Stalin, let us first look at some background on one of the most notorious mass murderers in history, Joseph Stalin, for by the end of his reign, he had become the Party. Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin was born Ioseb Jughasvili on December 21, 1879 in Gori, Georgia. As a child he was given the nickname Soso. His father was a cobbler named Vissarion Jughashvili, known as Beso, and his mother Ekaterina Geladze, was born a serf. They had two other children who died young. His father had been a serf, but after obtaining his freedom, he opened his own cobbler shop. He quickly went bankrupt and was forced to work in a shoe factory.

Stalin's grew up in an abusive family. His father was frequently drunk, and when he was, he beat Stalin and his mother. These beatings left Stalin hard and heartless and gave him a hatred of authority. It is said that anyone with power reminded him of his father. His father also instilled in him another cruel feeling -- anti-Semitism. "Because they were well-to-do and consummate masters of their craft, they were hated by the drunken ne'er-do-well Beso. As a small child Soso was given his first lessons in malice toward the Jews by his father."

In 1888, his father went to live in Tiflis, leaving the family without any means of support.

At the age of eight, Stalin began his education at the Gori Church School. In school, Stalin was forced to speak Russian and he and his Georgian classmates were held up to ridicule by the teachers because of his accent. They also mocked him for his ragged school uniform and his pockmarked face. Young Soso soon learned to outsmart his tormenters by intimidating them and exploiting their weaknesses. He avoided physical confrontation by accusing his attackers of using violence as a substitute for brains. In this way he would assert leadership over his peers.

Stalin excelled in school and graduated first in his class at the age of fourteen. He was awarded a scholarship to the Tiflis Theological Seminary, a Russian Orthodox school which he started attending in 1894. Although his mother wanted him to be a priest, Stalin attended for the educational opportunities, rather than because of any vocation for the Church. This is where Stalin's involvement with the socialist movement began. In 1899 he was expelled from the seminary after failing to appear for an examination.

Over the next decade, Stalin worked with the political underground in the Caucasas. During this time, between 1902 and 1917, he was repeatedly arrested and exiled to Siberia. He was an adherent of Vladimir Lenin's doctrine of a strong centralist party of professioanl revolutionaries, which was called Bolsheviks. There is also some evidence that Stalin, who had taken the pseudonym of Koba, was in the employ of the Tsar's Secret police. According to Olga Shatunovskaya, a member of the party since 1916, and at one time the secreatry to Stephan Shaumyan, chairman of the Baku Commune, he was. "Shatunovskaya stated publically on a number of occasions that Shaumyan had been absolutely convinced that Stalin was a provocateur. He used to talk about his own arrest in 1905 at a safe house known to one person only -- Koba."

His work gained him a place on the movement's Central Committee in 1912, and in 1913 he adopted the name Stalin, which means "man of steel" in Russian. It was during this time that Stalin was maried briefly to Ekaterina Svanidze in 1907. She died after three years, but they had one son together, whose name was Yakov Dzhugashvili. At the funeral he is said to have made a statement about any warm feelings he had for people, having died with his wife. His son, with whom he did not get along, served in the Red Army during the Second World War, where he was captured by the Nazis. Although the Nazis offered to exchange him for a German officer of higher rank, Stalin refused and his son was later killed trying to excape.

In 1917 Stalin was editor of Pravda while Lenin was in exile. After the February revolution, the first stage in the Russian Revolution, Stalin was elected to the Politburo in May, a position he held for the rest of his life. Stalin played only a minor role in the October revolution, apparently not distinquishing himself.

Later, he embellished his actions after he came to power.

In 1919 a Politburo was created initially with five members, to run the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) on a day-to-day basis. Previously, the highest body of the Party had been the Central Committee. The first full members of the Politburo were Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, Stalin and Nikolai Krestinsky, with Nikolai Bukharin, Grigori Zinoyiey and Mikhail Kalinin as alternate members. The governing body of the CPSU was the Party Congress which initially met annually through the 1920s, but whose meetings became less frequent, particularly under Stalin. Party Congresses would elect a Central Committee which, in turn, would elect a Politburo. Under Stalin the most powerful position in the party became the General Secretary, who was elected by the Politburo. In theory, supreme power in the party was held by the Party Congress, however, in practice the power structure became reversed and, particularly after the death of Lenin, supreme power rested with the General Secretary.

At lower levels, the organizational hierarchy was managed by Party Committees, or Partkoms. A Partkom was headed by the elected Partkom Secretary. The bottom level of the Party was the Primary Party Organization or Party Cell. It was created within any organizational entity of any kind where there were at least three communists. The management of a cell was called the Party Bureau. A Party Bureau was headed by the elected Bureau Secretary. At smaller Party Cells, secretaries were regular employees of the corresponding plant, hospital or school. Sufficiently large party organizations were usually headed by an Exempt Secretary, who drew his salary from the Party's money.

Membership in the party ultimately became a privilege, with Communist Party members becoming an elite, or Nomenklatura, in Soviet society. Members of the Nomenklatura would enjoy special privileges such as shopping at well-stocked stores, preference in obtaining housing and access to dachas and holiday resorts, being allowed to travel abroad, and sending their children to the best universities and obtain prestigious jobs for them. It became virtually impossible to join the Soviet ruling and managing elite without being a member of the Communist Party.

Membership had its risks, however, especially in the 1930s when the Party was subjected to purges under Stalin. Membership in the Party was not open. To become a Party member one had to be approved by various committees and one's past was closely scrutinised. As generations grew up never having known anything but the U.S.S.R., Party membership became something one generally achieved after passing a series of stages. Children would join the Young Pioneers and then, at the age of 14, graduate to the Komsomol (Young Communist League) and ultimately, as an adult, if one had shown the proper adherence to party discipline, or had the right connections, one would become a member of the Communist Party itself. When the Bolsheviks became the All Russian Communist Party, it had a membership of approximately 200,000. By 1933, the Party had approximately 3.5 million members and candidate members, but as a result of the Great Purge, Party membership fell to 1.9 million by 1939.

Following the October revolution in 1917, Russia was plunged into Civil War from 1918 to 1921. The two major opposing forces were the Red Army, which was the military arm of the Bolsheviks, and the White Army or White Movement. The Whites were Russian forces, both political and military, who were the monarchists, conservatives, liberals and socialists opposed to the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution. The White forces were a loose confederation of forces and lacked any type of central coordination. The officers who made up the core of the White Army mostly supported monarchist ideals, but some elements of the White Army drew support from many other political movements, including democrats, social revolutionaries, and others who opposed the October Revolution. There was also a third group, the Greens, who opposed both the Whites and the Red Army.

Initially, the Bolsheviks were lenient with those they deemed enemies of the state. In some cases, officers and men were released if they promised not to join the Whites. This quickly changed, however, after the attempted assasination of Lenin on August 30, 1918, and the assasination of Chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisei Uritsky. Following this, the "red terror" was unleashed and anyone suspected of counter-revolutionary activity could be imprisoned or executed without trial. The execution of ex-Tsar Nicholas II and his family on July 16, 1918 on the orders of the Yekaterinburg soviet increased the level of violence, and caused a particularly strong reaction from foreign governments. Twenty-one foreign countries, including the United States, Canada, England and France intervened on behalf of the Whites.

In December 1917, the Bolshevik government established a security force, the Cheka, which took over the role of the former Tsarist Okhranka. In 1918, the Communist government began to send political opponents to forced labor camps, which had been inherited from the Tsarist penal system of forced labor, ssylka. They were typically in Siberia and the extreme North of Russia. This system had been established to deal with political dissidents and common criminals without executing them. The Red Army had been re-reorganised under the new Supreme Military Council, headed by Leon Trotsky. The units were homogenized and former army officers were brought back into the army as "military specialists." In May 1918, compulsory conscription was reintroduced because the number of soldiers was only 450,000. In July, army commanders were purged, not with the purpose of introducing members of the Communist Party, but of bringing back experienced military officers from the pre-revolution period. In September Trotsky was appointed head of a new Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, with wide-ranging powers.

The Red Army was eventually victorious, but the war had taken an estimated 9 million lives, only a few years after the nearly bloodless October Revolution. Millions of others had been killed by the indirect effects of the war. The droughts of 1920 and 1921 and the famine of 1921 had worsened the situation, and another million had fled the country. During the civil war, Stalin played an important administrative role on the military fronts and in the capital. In 1922 he was elected General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party, which allowed him to build a group loyal to him and control the rank-and-file members. The position was unwanted by most members, but Stalin saw the potential, because it was the General Secretary who controlled whether a person was allowed to join the Party.

The Communist Party had seen ebbs and flows during the Civil War. Although data on Party membership was very unreliable during this period, membership had been rising steadily until the beginning of 1918 when it took a sudden drop. In the last months of 1918, this trend was reversed. The low point was reached in August 1919, when according to the Party's Secretariat, total membership was estimated at no more than 150,000.

During the autumm of 1919, Party recruitment efforts increased. This was at the height of the struggle against the Whites. From a base of about 230,000, membership was increased to 430,000 by January 1920 and to 600,000 by March. However, in spite of special efforts to recruit workers, their proportion of membership within the Party decreased from 57% in 1918 to 41% in January 1920. This meant that, "by the spring of 1921 approximately 90 precent of the membership had joined the Party after the October Revolution."

In the last years of his life, Lenin grew increasingly concerned about Stalin and his accumulation of personal power. When he died in 1924, Lenin left behind a Testament that called for the removal of Stalin, who he described as "rude." Fortunitely for Stalin, the Testament also criticized other members of the Central Committee, and they agreed to suppress it. "With all his political experience Lenin was bound to realize that a letter containing such demeaning descriptions of all his heirs might simply never reach the party. It would unite them in the wish to suppress it. That, incidentially, is what actually happened."

In Decemer 1923, amid concerns about raising productivity in the factories, the Communist Party began a mass enrollment campaign directed at the worker class. A decision was made by the Politburo and the Presidium of the Central Control Commission to admit 100,000 workers into the Party. In 1924 and 1925 in honor of Lenin's death, 638,070 people entered the Party, of whom 439,715 were workers. This was both an attempt to "proletarianize" the party and an attempt by Stalin to strengthen his base by outnumbering the Old Bolsheviks, and reducing their influence in the party. "Total membership in the Party, which had stood at 446,089 on January 1, 1924, reached stightly over one million by January 1, 1926. Some 400,000 were enrolled in the Komosomol as well."

In October 1927, a third campaign brought in 108,000 recruits to the Party, 80% of which were workers.

At Lenin's death there were five individuals jockeying for power. The leader of the Left Opposition was Leon Trotsky, opposed by Bukharin of the Right Opposition. Stalin initially allied himself with Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoyiey in the middle, forming a trioka to defeat Trotsky. Trotsky was the strongest contender to replace Lenin but he was ousted as Commissar of War in 1925. Stalin promptly turned on Kamenev and Zinoyiey, aligning himself with Bukharin. Changes in ideology seemed not to bother him. Stalin shifted from side to side and eventually rid the party of both factions by forging a path that integrated the ideas of both camps. He adapted the "leftist" stance that opposed market agriculture because they wanted to produce the material basis for communism quickly through a planned economy, despite unfavorable conditions. But he also endorsed the "rightist" faction's concept of "socialism in one country," which favored concentrating on internal development rather than exporting revolution. He also favored extensive exports of grain and raw materials; the revenues from foreign exchange allowing the Soviet Union to import foreign technologies needed for industrial development.

Kamenev and Zinoyiey joined forces with Trotsky in a desperate attempt to defeat Stalin, but their efforts failed and they were forced to resign from the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Stalin used Trotsky's previous criticisms of Zinoviev and Kamenev to defeat and demote them and bring in allies like Molotov, Voroshilov and Mikhail Kalinin. Trotsky was dropped from the politburo entirely in 1926. He was exiled, and eventually executed in Mexico in 1940. Part of the way in which Stalin was able to achieve superiority was because of secret files he possessed detailing damaging information about his peers.

Trotsky also claimed that around 1928 he found out that Stalin had a special archive containing documents, bits of evidence, and discreditable rumors about all prominent Soviet figures, without exception. In 1929 at the time of the open break with the members of the 'right' in the politburo -- Bukharin, Rykov, andTomsky -- Stalin kept Kaslinin and Voroshilov on his side by threatening to expose their depravity.

Stalin then turned on Bukharin and arranged to eliminate him as a contender. He appropriated Trotsky's criticisms of Bukharin's right wing policies. Stalin espoused a new general line favouring collectivization of the peasantry and rapid industrialization of industry, forcing Bukharin and his supporters into a Right Opposition. At the Central Committee meeting held in July 1928, Bukharin and his supporters argued that Stalin's new policies would cause a breach with the peasantry. Bukharin also brought up Lenin's Testament. Bukharin had support from the Party organization in Moscow and the leadership of several commisariats. However, Stalin's control of the secretariat was decisive because it allowed him to manipulate elections to party posts throughout the country giving him control over a large section of the Central Committee. The Right Opposition was defeated, and Bukharin attempted to form an alliance with Kamenev and Zinoviev, but it was too late. Bukharin and the Right Opposition were, in their turn, sidelined and removed from important positions within the Communist Party and the Soviet government. Bukharin was isolated from his allies abroad, and was unable to mount a sustained struggle against Stalin. In 1938, he was executed by Stalin.

The issue involved in the center of these struggles was over the course of the Russian economy. The right wing wanted to grant concessions to the peasents and continue Lenin's New Economic Plan (NEP). The left wanted to proceed with large-scale indutrailization, at the expense of the peasents. As has been noted, Stalin's position changed depending upon the political situation and the NEP continued successfully until 1928. By that time, Stalin had consolidated power and reversed the NEP and started collectivization of agriculture and the Five-Year Plan. Stalin was able to abandon the NEP by pointing out the rise of the Nepmen (small retailers profiting off the growing urban-rural trade) and Kulaks (the emerging upper-middle class of wealthy peasant farmers) under the NEP as new capitalistic classes.

The first Five-Year Plan established central planning as the basis of economic decision-making, with the emphasis on rapid heavy industrialization. It began the rapid process of transforming a largely agrarian nation, consisting of peasants, into an industrial superpower. In effect, the initial goals were laying the foundations for future exponential economic growth. Stalin's forced industrialization, however, had its downside. It led to a policy of man-made famine against unwilling segments of society in Russia and the Ukraine, eventually resulting in the deaths of millions of people. "No one knows how many people famine carried off. Estimates vary between five and eight million."

In December 1927, Stalin announced that in order to counter the (imaginary) imperialist threat, the Soviet Union would need to move from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy. "Indeed, the entire Soviet industrial buildup was from the beginning geared to military needs."

Starting in 1928, the five-year plans began building a heavy industrial base in this underdeveloped economy immediately, through the expansion of light industry, without waiting years for capital to accumulate, and without reliance on external financing. The country now became industrialized at an unbelievable pace. After the reconstruction of the economy was completed, following the destruction caused by the Russian Civil War, and after the initial plans of further industrialization were fulfilled, the explosive growth slowed down, but still generally surpassed most other countries in terms of total material production.

This expansion of the industrial base without the help of internal accumulation meant that the peasent class would supply the food necessary for the indutrial labor force. This led to mass colectivization, and involved two processes. "One was the liquidation of the kulaks as a class, in other words, as human beings; the other, the destruction of peasent communes as well as any independence of the peasentry. The peasents were herded into collective farms (kolkhozy), where they labored not for themselves, but for the state."

In the 1930s, Stalin instigated a series of purges against senior members of the Party, culminating in the Great Purge of 1935 to 1938. Senior Communists, many of whom had been Stalin's allies were removed, and many of them were executed or died under mysterious circumstances, including Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin. There are theories that the purges were initiated as a tool in Stalin's struggle for power, but they were also used as an economic measure. In addition to well-known high-level Party members, many others were arrested by the United State Political Directorate (OPGU).

162,726 persons were arrested in 1929, mostly for 'counterrevolutionary activity,' 2,109 were shot, some 25,000 were sent camps and as many again into exile. In 1930 arrests doubled to a third of a million and executions increased tenfold to 20,000. The camps received over 100,000. By 1934 there would be half a million slave laborers. The camp economies, with their terrible mortality and relentless thirst for expendable laorers, would come to dictate the number of arrests.

At the 17th Congress of the CPSU in February 1934, the last piece of business was the elction by the Central Committee. Only one person was nominated for each position on the Politburo. Sergei Kirov received only four negative votes in the election to the Politburo, showing himself to be the most popular Soviet leader. Stalin received 292 negative votes, ranking him the least popular.

According to Molotov's memoirs as well as other reports, a number of party members at the Congress had approached Kirov with the proposal that he run for the position of General Secretary against Stalin.

On December 1, 1934, Kirov was walking along a corridor in the Smolny Institute, when a young man pulled a revolver and shot him. He died almost instantly. A few hours later, Stalin drafted the decree that came to be known as the "Law of 1 December." It was approved by the Politburo two days later and ordered that the period of questioning terrorist suspects be reduced to ten days, allowed suspects to be tried without legal respresentation and permitted executions to carried out immediately. It has always been assumed that Stalin initiated the purges as a response to opposition to him within the party. Recent works cast doubt about Stalin's involvement, however. "The theory has recently been called into question, particularly in the work of Alla Kirilina."

Whether or not Stalin was personally behind the assassination of Kirov in order to remove a rival, the assasination was used as a pretext for purges.

Although the purge began as an investigation into Kirov's murder, eventually Zinoviev and Kamenev were charged with the murder as members of the "Moscow Center" and subjected to show trials before being executed. The "investigation" continued and soon found thousands of alleged conspirators who were similarly rounded up and shot, or put into labor camps. Stalin claimed that Kirov's assassin, Leonid Nikolayev, was part of a larger conspiracy led by Zinoviev, Kamenev and ultimately Trotsky against the Soviet government. "From December 1934 to February 1935, 6,500 people were sentenced under the new guidelines to combat terrorism."

Additional triggers for the purge may have been the refusal by the Politburo in 1932 to approve the execution of M.N. Riutin, an Old Bolshevik who had distributed a two hundred page pamphlet calling for the removal of Stalin and their refusal in 1933 to approve the execution of A.P. Smirnov, who had been a party member since 1896 and had also been found to be agitating for Stalin's removal. The failure of the Politburo to act ruthlessly against anti-Stalinists in the Party may have combined in Stalin's mind with Kirov's growing popularity to convince him of the need to move decisively against his opponents, real or perceived, and destroy them and their reputations as a means of consolidating his power over the Party and the state. In his war against so-called "class enemies," Stalin expanded the labor camps into the Gulag system. He also undertook massive resettlements of Kulaks, by moving them to remote areas.

The Moscow Trials lasted until 1938 and were used to eliminate various rivals, as well as numerous supporters of Stalin, who were considered suspect for some reason or another. They were blamed with the failure of Stalin's Five-Year Plan to meet its goals as well as other problems in the Soviet Union. A number of the original Bolshevik leaders such as Bukharin, Radek, Rykov and Rakovsky who were accused of plotting to overthrow Stalin or even conspiring with Hitler against the U.S.S.R., were tried and executed. Eventually it came to an end because saw Stalin saw that to continue would be impossible. In a logical progression, eventually the entire country would be in a camp or executed.

The first substantial question an interrogator asked was, "Who are your accomplices?" So from each arrest, several other arrests more or less automatically followed. But if this had gone on for a few more months, and each new victim named only two or three accomplishes, the next wave would have struck at 10 to 15% of the population, and soon after that at 30 to 45% ... We can see that the extreme limits had been reached. To have gone on would have been impossible economically, politically, and even physically, in that interrogators, prisons, and camps, already grotesquely overloaded, could not have managed it ... The work of the mass Purge had been done. The country was crushed.