The High Title of a Communist: Postwar Party Discipline and the Values of the Soviet Regime 9781501757778

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THE HIGH TITLE OF A COMMUNIST

THE HIGH TITLE

OF ACOMMUNIST

POSTWAR PARTY DISCIPLINE AND THE VALUES OF THE SOVIET REGIME EDWARD COHN

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS/ DEKALB

Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb 60115 © 2015 by Northern Illinois University Press All rights reserved 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15

1 2

3 4 5

978-o-87580-489-7 (doth) 978-1-60909-179-8 (ebook) Book design by Shaun Allshouse Cover design by Yuni Dorr Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cohn, Edward. The high title of a Communist : postwar party discipline and the values of the Soviet regime I Edward Cohn, Assistant Professor of History, Grinnell College. - First edition. pages em Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-o-87580-489-7 (cloth: alk. paper)- ISBN 978-1-60909-179-8 (ebook) 1. Kommunisticheskaia partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza-Discipline-History. 2. Kommunisticheskaia partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza-Purges. 3· Party disciplineSoviet Union. I. Title. II. Title: Postwar party discipline and the values of the Soviet regime. JN6598.K55C64 2015 324.247' 07509045-dc23 2015014791

for Susan

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix List of Abbreviations and Russian-Language Terms Acknowledgments xiii Note on Pseudonyms xvii

Introduction

xi

3

Chapter One The Communist Party and Its System of Internal Discipline in the Postwar Years The Party's Role in Soviet Society 16 Unofficial Roles of the Communist Party: Career Advancement and Networking The Individual Communist's Role in Soviet Society The Hierarchy of Party Punishments

33

The Road to Expulsion and Censure

41

27

Party Discipline and the Organizational Responsibilities of Communists Criminal Law and Party Discipline

48

51

Chapter Two The Last Purge: The Expulsion of POWs and Communists Who lived on Occupied Territory

54

Retribution and the Civic Purge in Europe (and Beyond) The Extent and Nature of the Purge 61

57

Defining "Unworthy Conduct" and Passivity under the Occupation Gender and the Politics of Occupation

68

72

Former POWs in the Postwar Communist Party

75

Chapter Three De-Stalinizing Party Discipline: Purging and Politics in Postwar Expulsion Cases 81 Political Transgressions in the Postwar Stalin Years

83

De-Stalinization, Rehabilitation, and Political Misconduct under Khrushchev The Restoration and Rehabilitation of Purge Victims in the Khrushchev Era The Limits of Rehabilitation Ending the Postwar Purge Punishing the Perpetrators

101 104 109

89 94

25

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Table ofContents

viii

Chapter Four Policing the Party: Corruption, Administrative Misconduct, and Control from Above in Postwar Party Discipline 115 Corruption and Administrative Misconduct in the Party: The Statistics

117

Corruption, Administrative Misconduct, and the Theft of State Property under Stalin

120

. Obstacles to the Struggle with Corruption: Passive Communists and Interference in Court 129 The Struggle with Corruption and Administrative Crime under Khrushchev

136

Chapter Five Sex and the Married Communist: Family Troubles and Marital Infidelity in the Postwar Communist Party 142 Communism and Morality under Late Stalinism

145

Family and Party under Khrushchev: The Theory 150 The Practice of Khrushchev-Era Party Discipline in the Family 155 Party Discipline and Family Life after World War II

164

Chapter Six "We Talk a lot, but Take Very Few Measures": The Party's Struggle with Drunkenness among Its Members 166 Drinking and Drunkenness in the USSR and the Communist Party 168 Drunkenness, Labor Discipline, and Work under Stalin

172

Drunkenness as a Social Problem: The Khrushchev-Era."School of Communism'' Drunkenness, Party Discipline, and Public Opinion

Conclusion Notes

192

197

Bibliography 237 Index 255

187

178

Illustrations

Figures FIGURE 1: Communist Party Membership, 1938-1964 21 FIGuRE 2: Communist Party Membership by Social Class, 1938-1962

25

Tables TABLE

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TABLE

3:

TABLE

TABLE

4:

TABLE TABLE

5: 6:

TABLE

7:

TABLE

8:

Communist Party Membership by Year, 1938-1964 19 The Class Breakdown of Communists, 1946-1964 20 Penalties within the Party Discipline System (in Ascending Order of Severity) 36 Expulsions from the Communist Party by Year, 1945-1964 38 An Outline of the Party Discipline Process 43 Expulsions for "Unworthy Conduct on Occupied Territory or in Captivity" and Treason 65 Appeals to the KPK by Communists Expelled for "Unworthy Conduct under Occupation or in Captivity;' 1945-1953 66 The Role of Gender in KPK Appeals of Occupation Cases, 1946-1951

TABLE

9:

TABLE

10:

TABLE 11: TABLE 12: TABLE TABLE

TABLE TABLE

13: 14:

15: 16:

1945-1953 TABLE TABLE TABLE

74

Women in Occupation Cases in Select Raikoms of Kalinin Province 75 Expulsions for Political Misdeeds, 1945-1953 85 Expulsions for Political Misdeeds, 1953-1964 92 Expulsions for the Loss of Party Documents, 1954-1964 94 Rehabilitation Cases at the KPK, 1955-1961 97 Appeals to the KPK by Communists Expelled for "Unworthy Conduct in Captivity and on Occupied Territory, Concealment of These Facts;' 1953-1961 107 Expulsions for Administrative Wrongdoing, 1939-1951 119 Expulsions for '~buse of a Service Position" and Degeneracy, 120

17: Expulsions for Administrative Offenses, 1954-1964 121 18: Expulsions for "Unworthy Conduct in Everyday Life;' 1954-1964 163 19: Party Discipline Cases Involving Drunkenness in Two Large Soviet Factories, 1945-1961 173

Abbreviations and Russian-language Terms

blat

the use of informal connections and social networks to obtain scarce goods and services through a reciprocal, non-hierarchical system of exchange

CPSU

Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Ezhovshchina

a Russian term for the period of the Great Terror in which Nikolai Ezhov was in charge of the Soviet secret police

gorkom kolkhoz

city party committee

KPK

Komissiia (or Komitet) Partiinogo Kontrolia; in English, the

collective farm Commission of Party Control (before 1952) or the Committee of Party Control (after 1953)

krai kraiispolkom kraikom

territory

MVD

ministry of internal affairs

obkom oblast oblispolkom

provincial party committee

territorial executive committee (a government organ) territorial party committee

province provincial executive committee (a government organ)

party collegium the body that investigated expulsion cases before they were officially decided at the provincial level of the obkom PPO

a primary party organization, the most basic unit of the party (most typically found in a workplace)

raiispolkom raikom raion sel'sovet sovkhoz

district executive committee district party committee district village soviet (council) state farm

Sovmin

Council of Ministers

Sovnarkom

Council of People's Commissars

vygovor

reprimand or censure

Acknowledgments

Writing a book is a collective endeavor, and I could not have completed this volume without the encouragement, support, advice, and assistance of a large number of people and institutions. The United States Department of Education funded a majority of my research through a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad fellowship, enabling me to spend nine months in Russia in 2005. The University of Chicago provided me with two Doolittle-Harrison travel fellowships, a Research Trips to Russia fellowship, and a Dissertation Teaching and Writing Fellowship. Grinnell College, finally, awarded me two faculty research grants, allowing me to make month-long trips to Moscow and Kyiv in the summers of 2008 and 2010. I am also grateful to the college for giving me research leave in the fall of 2012, which I spent mostly on revisions to this manuscript. I began this book more than a decade ago as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where I had the pleasure of working with a group of dedicated faculty and talented graduate students. Sheila Fitzpatrick was a model adviser from the beginning of my dissertation research, providing me with valuable guidance on the nuances of Soviet history, the mechanics of archival research, and the craft of historical writing. Richard Hellie shared his encyclopedic knowledge of all things Russian and his love of quantitative analysis; I was saddened to learn of his death two years after I finished my dissertation. Ron Suny shared his wide expertise in Soviet history, while Jan Goldstein advised me on the finer points of theory and gave me valuable feedback from the perspective of a specialist on Western Europe. Whatever its faults, this book has benefited immensely from the guidance of my dissertation committee. I am equally grateful to my fellow graduate students in Russian history and to all the participants in the university's Russian Studies Workshop. I owe a special debt to Alan Barenberg, Mark Edele, Brian LaPierre, Chris Raffensperger, and Ben Zajicek, whose insightful comments have continued to shape this book even after we left Chicago, but I owe thanks to all the members of the Chicago kruzhok: Jennifer Amos, Rachel Applebaum, Heidy Berthoud, Julia Fein, Leah Goldman, Rachel Green, Charles Hachten, Steve Harris, Andy Janco, Mie Nakachi, Ken Roh, Oscar Sanchez, Andrey Shlyakhter, Andrew Sloin, and Michael Westren. The members of Chicago's Russianist community helped to make the university not only an intellectually exciting place to study Russian history, but a congenial home for seven years.

xiv

Acknowledgments

Since leaving Chicago, I have been lucky to find an intellectual home as supportive as Grinnell College. Rob Lewis was an excellent sounding board and friend during two long years of weekly commuting to Chicago. Dan Kaiser provided useful commentary on an early version of chapter s and has always been happy to share his immense knowledge of Russian history. The other members of the History Department have all been extremely supportive of my research and teaching, especially my senior colleagues: Victoria Brown, Elizabeth Prevost, Sarah Purcell, and Pablo Silva. Danielle Lussier has been an insightful and enthusiastic member of Grinnell's community of Russian scholars. The members of Grinnell's Russian Department (Todd Armstrong, Tolya Vishevsky, Kelly Herold, and Raquel Greene) have answered my questions on translation and helped make Grinnell an exciting place to study the Russian world, while two talented Grinnell students-Alex McConnell and Cary Speck-served ably as research assistants. Lisa Mulholland, Marna Montgomery, De Dudley, and Vicki Bunnell made Mears Cottage a pleasant place to work. This book has also benefited from the expertise of scholars outside Chicago and Grinnell. Elena Zubkova provided indispensable advice on archival research in Moscow and the provinces, writing letters of support that helped me get access to documents that were crucial to my work. Jim Heinzen shared his knowledge of the Soviet procuracy and provided feedback on an early version of chapter 4, while Yoram Gorlizki kindly sent me his notes on an elusive procuracy file, and Cynthia Hooper shared her insights on the Committee of Party Control. Benjamin Frommer provided feedback on an early version of chapter 2. Arch Getty was happy to discuss the nuances of the party's prewar disciplinary system with me on several occasions. Jeffrey Rossman gave me useful suggestions on working in Ivanovo, while Sergei Tachenov helped out after my arrival there; Donald Raleigh performed a similar service for Saratov, while Denis Alexeyev, A. I. Avrus, and A. A. German helped make a frustrating visit to the city as productive as possible. Bill Parsons helped me to establish useful contacts in Tver: proving that it's always useful to have two historians of Russia in the same family. Once I reached Tver: Inna Povedskaia helped me to achieve every graduate student's dream: to conduct my research while living in an imperial palace built by Catherine the Great. Mark Harrison, Stephen Kotkin, and Amir Weiner provided useful advice on a July 2011 visit to the Hoover Institution, while Rudiger Bergien, Jens Gieseke, and their colleagues at the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam helped me to understand the history of the Soviet Communist party within its wider European context. Bob Weinberg and Pieter Judson, finally, helped inspire my interest in history when I was a student at Swarthmore College and have been unfailingly supportive ever since. I am also indebted to the staffs of a number of libraries and archives. June Farris, the Slavic bibliographer at Chicago's Regenstein Library, was an excellent resource from my first weeks as a graduate student until the final days before my dissertation defense. The staff of the Government Documents and Microfilms

Acknowledgments

XV

Collection at Harvard's Lamont Library was consistently helpful during my four-month stay in Cambridge. The staff of each of the archives I visited in Moscow and Kyiv facilitated my research and made this book possible. I am especially grateful, however, to the staffs of the Tver' Center for the Documentation of Contemporary History and the State Socio-Political Archive of Perm' Province. Doing archival research in the provinces can be either a chore or a pleasure, but I consistently enjoyed my stays in both Tver' and Perm'. V. A. Feoktistov in Tver: and M. G. Nechaev and L. S. Bortnik in Perffi, deserve a lot of the credit for my success. I have presented portions of my work to a number of workshops and conferences over the last nine years. The University of Chicago's Russian Studies and Modern European History Workshops provided invaluable feedback on four chapters of my original dissertation, and the members of the Midwest Russian History Workshop helped me refine four chapters of my dissertation and book. I also presented papers based on my research at the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies; at the University of Pennsylvania's 2010 symposium "The Thaw: Visual Culture and Beyond"; and at the 2013 conference "Communist Parties Revisited: Socio-Cultural Approaches to Party Rule in the Soviet Bloc, 1956-1991;' sponsored by the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam. The process of revising my dissertation into a finished book manuscript has been surprisingly smooth, thanks to the professionalism of the staff at Northern Illinois University Press. It was a pleasure to work with Amy Farranto and Nathan Holmes, and the two anonymous reviewers for the Press gave me useful feedback that pushed me to clarify my ideas and sharpen the book's argumentation. John Grennan did a meticulous job of compiling the book's index. An earlier version of chapter 5 appeared in the article "Sex and the Married Communist: Marital Infidelity, Family Troubles, and Communist Party Discipline in the Post-War USSR, 1945-1964;' The Russian Review 68, no. 3 (July 2009): 429-50. Parts of chapter 4 appeared in the article "Policing the Party: Conflicts between Local Prosecutors and Party Organs under Late Stalinism;' Europe-Asia Studies 65, no. 10 (December 2013): 1912-30. Thanks to the publishers for their permission to include parts of each article in this book. I owe a final debt to my family. My parents, Donald and Linda Cohn, provided constant emotional and financial support as I researched and wrote this book; during my 2004 stay in Boston, my father also designed a random number generator to help me produce an independent random sample of appeals to the KPK. Henry Cohn, my brother, gave me advice on this project from the vantage point of a mathematician. Arlene Brown, a close family friend, also provided encouragement and support, but died unexpectedly about a year before I completed my dissertation. My greatest thanks, however, are due to my wife, Susan Ferrari. Susan has been a part of this project from the beginning and has put up with my frequent visits to Russia with remarkable good humor; she has

xvi

Acknowledgments

also been tolerant of my tendency to drone on about Russian history and my need to spend a lot of Sunday afternoons at the office to finish this book. I'm thankful for all the time I've been able to spend with you, Susan, and this book is dedicated to you.

Note on Pseudonyms

In order to protect the identity of the people whose lives are discussed in this book, I have chosen to give each person a pseudonym, designated by a letter of the alphabet. These letters were chosen randomly: Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov might be labeled "Comrade 0" or "Comrade z:' for example, depending on my whim as I was writing the chapter in which he appeared. In some archives, I was not allowed to copy down the names of the people whose case files I read, and in these instances, it is possible that I have accidentally assigned a Communist his own initial as a pseudonym. I have tried both to assign an individual pseudonym to every Communist whose case I discussed in detail and to limit each letter of the alphabet to one use per chapter. Although I made an effort to ensure that Communists whose misconduct was discussed in multiple chapters received the same pseudonym each time they appeared, readers should not assume that two Communists designated the same way were the same person. In other words, a Communist described as Comrade Z in chapter 1 will be different from one described as Comrade Z in chapter 2, unless I explicitly note otherwise. I have included the real names of Soviet citizens on a few occasions, most often in chapter 3. I did so only when their misconduct involved changing their names in order to hide their ethnicity (in which case I used only their first name and patronymic) or when they served in a major political office (and therefore qualify as public figures rather than private citizens). When I discussed the case of a Communist whose behavior was described in a newspaper article or in a document that has since been published, finally, I often used his or her actual name, since it was already in the public record.

THE HIGH TITLE OF A COMMUNIST

Introduction

0

M A R c H 1 8 , 1 9 5 9 , the Communist Party's provincial party committee in the Siberian city of Kemerevo heard the case of a factory director who was accused of squabbling constantly with his wife, abandoning her for a woman he had met on a vacation to the resort city of Sochi, and neglecting the upbringing of his teenaged son, who had recently been convicted of hooliganism; after a lengthy misconduct hearing, the committee voted to expel him from the party.' On October 25, 1949, the Central Committee of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic debated the behavior of a high-ranking official in the republic's Communist Youth League (or Komsomol), ultimately expelling him from the party for concealing his Jewish faith, claiming that his merchant father had actually been a poor peasant, and lying about the extent of his service in World War II.> Lastly, on April 2, 1947, a collective-farm chairwoman from Tver' Province was expelled from the party for stealing 64 kilograms of grain from the farm's pantry, bartering this pilfered grain for vodka, embezzling 2,200 rubles of kolkhoz money, and paying "little attention'' to her duties on the farm, which failed to meet its production quotas.3 These Communists came from different regions and were accused of very different offenses, but they had one important trait in common: in the words of party propagandists, they had discredited "the high title of a Communist" and did not deserve a place within the party's ranks. 4 Between the Red Army's May 1945 victory over Nazi Germany and the ouster of Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union expelled more than 1.7 million of its members, for offenses ranging from embezzlement and drunkenness to war-time collaboration with the Nazis. 5 In several million more cases, the party decided not to expel a member accused of misconduct, but to give him or her a party reprimand instead; in all, during the twenty years after the war, between five and seven million Communists were reprimanded, demoted from full party membership to candidate status, or expelled. 6 Expulsion was unlikely to lead to a Communist's arrest or execution (as it sometimes had in the 1930s), but it could have serious consequences nonetheless: the expelled Communist typically suffered a major career setback, sometimes lost his or her job, and was always denied an array of unofficial privileges given to party members. Party discipline was not a simple matter of punishing wrongdoers and cleansing the party's ranks of the unworthy, however. N

4

Introduction

The regime viewed its misconduct investigations as a form of"moral education" (vospitanie)/ which meant that accused Communists were subjected to a series of humiliating hearings that aired their dirty laundry in front of their family, friends, and coworkers and sent a message to other party members about how they should behave. Many Communists referred to misconduct proceedings as a "school of Communism'' that would teach accused party members and other citizens the error of their ways. In short, the Communist Party's system of internal investigations and disciplinary hearings confronted an extremely important question: what it meant to be a good Communist and, more broadly, a good Soviet citizen. The High Title of a Communist analyzes the party's system of expulsion and censure in the nineteen tumultuous years between the end of World War II and the 1964 overthrow of Nikita Khrushchev, using changes in the party disciplinary system to cast light on the values and political culture of the postwar Soviet regime. Communists, after all, were members of an elite political and social group, consisting of roughly 3 to 5 percent of the country's overall population and about 10 percent of adult men. 8 Because party members were meant to be leaders in politics and the workplace, they were expected to be model citizens who exemplified the regime's values and fought to implement its policies. Moreover, the regime had long been involved in efforts to reshape the identity, world view, and behavior of the Soviet population, making Communist party discipline an important part of larger processes of political and social transformation. 9 Defining and enforcing the party's internal behavioral code could therefore help both to ensure the effectiveness of the party as an institution and to shape the attitudes and actions of the population at large. As a result, party discipline investigations had a long reach: when the party investigated the misconduct of the philandering factory director mentioned above, for example, it was also trying to shape the values and behavior of his wife (a fellow Communist, who was censured by the party for her role in the family's troubles), their hooligan son, their other children, the many Communists who worked in the factory, and the rest of the factory workforce, which quickly learned about the director's fall from prominence. 10 Party misconduct investigations were a ubiquitous aspect of Soviet life, an important part of the work of local party organizations, and a valuable tool for the regime in spreading its values throughout the population. Until recently, however, historians have mostly limited their study of the party disciplinary system to the era before World War II, focusing-for obvious reasons-on the Great Terror of the 1930s." By contrast, this volume shows that the twenty years after World War II were a crucial transitional period in the history of the Soviet Union-a period when the regime strove to redefine what its propagandists termed "the norms of socialist life" at a time of social and economic upheaval, rising Cold War tensions, and dramatic political change. Before the war, the USSR had been a dynamic and fast-changing revolutionary state, dedicated to the transformation of society and to the forging of a New Soviet Man with socialist values; after 1964, the bureaucratization and 12

Introduction

5

hypocrisy of the ruling elite became a popular subject for Soviet comedy and a jaded population lost much of its faith in the messages of official propaganda.'3 The period covered by this book can even be viewed as the era when the party began to deal with the consequences of the Eighteenth Party Congress, which helped to permanently change the composition and identity of the party when it abolished the mass purge and made it easier for white-collar workers to become Communists. 14 In The High Title of a Communist, light is cast on these changes by examining how the regime sought to shape the behavioral norms surrounding party membership and Soviet citizenship at a time when the identity of the elite was quickly evolving. In the midst of a postwar economic and social crisis (and then a period of rapid social and political change), misconduct by Communists both symbolized the regime's failure to transform society and threatened its ability to combat the country's problems. More specifically, two major changes in the party's behavioral norms in the twenty years following World War II are traced in this work. The first of these changes concerned a Communist's approach to his or her duties as a party member and citizen. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Soviet society was experiencing an economic and social crisis at the same time that membership in the Communist Party was becoming more closely linked to membership in the country's administrative elite than ever before;15 under postwar Stalinism (from 1945 to 1953), the regime therefore emphasized a vision of the ideal Communist that centered on tight discipline and efficient implementation of orders from the central authorities, cracking down on Communists who committed seemingly trivial organizational offenses (like the loss of a party membership card or the failure to pay dues) or who put their own personal self-interest ahead of the economic needs of the Soviet state. But at the same time that late Stalinist officials emphasized a rigidly hierarchical vision of party discipline, they worried that many Communists were losing their enthusiasm and initiative. They lamented the fact that many party members had become overly passive in the struggle against misconduct by their peers and, more broadly, in the push for social change. This worry about the "passivity" of the country's Communists remained an important part of Soviet public life throughout the Stalin and Khrushchev years and helped bring about an important change in the regime's conception of the ideal Communist. During the Khrushchev era, in fact, party leaders sought to mobilize the USSR's party members behind a new, more activist vision of the model citizen, emphasizing the importance of enthusiasm and initiative rather than discipline and obedience. 16 Under Khrushchev, the ideal Communist was frequently portrayed as a "fighter for a socialist everyday life" who spoke out against the misbehavior of his peers while subordinating his own interests to those of the regime in every sphere of society-at home, at work, and in the broader public. 17 The second major change in how the regime viewed the ideal Communist dealt with the types of misconduct that were deemed most serious by party officials. From 1945 onward, party organizations became less interested in investigating political disloyalty and unorthodoxy among their members, stepping

6

Introduction

away from their prewar obsession with the political views, the class identity, and the supposed opposition activity of individual Communists.'8 In fact, although the late Stalinist years were marked by the regime's harsh treatment of much of the population at large, the leadership's emphasis on political loyalty and orthodoxy within the party (and its contrast between good Communists, on the one hand, and hidden enemies and "alien elements" on the other) declined dramatically even before Stalin's 1953 death. Moreover, as concerns about juvenile delinquency, hooliganism, and social instability increased in the postwar years, many party organizations began to intervene more invasively in the personal lives of their members-a trend that became more prominent during the Khrushchev era.'9 The party was less likely, then, to discipline a Communist who had flirted with Trotskyism or whose father had been a kulak, but more likely to drag alcoholics and philanderers before their peers to discuss the most intimate details of their private lives. Soviet power had become less repressive, but more intrusive. These changes in the regime's expectations of its members were intimately linked. After all, it is hardly surprising that when the party pushed Communists to move beyond relatively straightforward obedience to the regime to a more activist vision of party membership, it also encouraged them to expand their activism beyond the workplace and into their families and society at large. Moreover, as the regime became less repressive in cracking down on deviance and dissent, it needed to find new ways to mobilize Communists and other citizens for social and political change. The High Title of a Communist, then, seeks to explain these changes in how the country's leaders defined and enforced "the norms of socialist life" and analyzes how the party's evolving behavioral code shaped the lives of Soviet citizens. It argues that in the two decades after World War II, at a time when the regime faced new challenges but was reluctant to espouse the militant, class-based vision of the ideal Communist that had been dominant before the war, the party leadership ran into difficulties defining and enforcing an effective new moral code for the country's Communists. The regime did at times shape the population's world view in distinctively Soviet ways, but its desire to transform the values and behavior of the population was an unrealistically utopian goal, and party discipline was often an ineffective tool in transforming society.'0 As a result, the party's resounding rhetoric and repeated failures to meet its objectives ultimately called into question both the vitality of the regime and the relevance of the party as an institution. The story of Communist party discipline, in short, was also the story of the party membership's declining role as an activist force in Soviet politics.

The Communist Party in the Postwar Years

In the two decades after 1945, both the Soviet regime's expectations of party members and the workings of the party's internal disciplinary system were in a

Introduction

7

state of flux. Broadly speaking, the postwar Communist Party's informal behavioral code for its members was shaped by three main factors: the evolving role of the party in Soviet politics and society, the impact of World War II on the country's population and social system, and the regime's changing attitude toward political repression. Each of these factors has been a major focus of attention for scholars of Soviet history and politics. The first factor shaping the behavioral norms of the Communist Party was the changing nature and role of the party itself-a frequent subject of study for political scientists during the Cold War. Between 1945 and 1964, the Communist Party nearly doubled in size and became far less proletarian in its class composition. Although it had long been defined by its origins as a revolutionary workers' movement, the party began to recruit more white-collar workers (sluzhashchie) beginning in the 1930s; during the war itself, millions of soldiers joined the party's ranks while serving on the front lines (winning admission without regard to their class status), helping to change the party's class composition and further weakening its traditional link to the proletariat. 22 In the years that followed, the identity of the party therefore became ambiguous and conflicted: Was it a revolutionary movement of the working classes, as its 1917 program proclaimed? Was it the ruling party of the bureaucracy and the state apparatus, representing the interests of the regime and of a new elite of privileged white-collar workers, as several high-profile critics charged? 23 Or was it a broad-based "party of the entire people;' as propagandists began to argue in the 196os?24 In recent years, historians have been slow to investigate the inner workings of the postwar party, but this volume elucidates the ways that the party's conflicted identity complicated its vision of social change and its internal behavior code. 25 Although the party never completely broke with its proletarian roots or became a mass movement open to all Soviet citizens, it moved away from its origins as a "vanguard of the proletariat" in ways that made it more bureaucratic and less revolutionary than it had been before the war. Both the party's bureaucratization and the regime's populist efforts to fight the ensuing "passivity" of its members shaped the party's behavioral norms throughout the postwar era, as local party organizations worried about losing their special sense of ideological mission and becoming an appendage of the administrative state. Second, World War II cast a long shadow over Soviet society, devastating much of the country and leaving the postwar government with a long list of economic and social problems to contend with. 26 After all, World War II killed over twenty-six million Soviet citizens, destroyed a million residences and more than ninety-six million square meters of housing, and forced the regime to evacuate at least seventeen million citizens from their homes near the front to safer locations in the country's interior. 27 Stalin's government had wanted to remake Soviet society since long before 1945, and now it redoubled its efforts. Social problems such as hooliganism, alcohol abuse, and the collapse of the family were exacerbated by the war and its aftermath, and the government was left with 21

8

Introduction

the difficult task of economic reconstruction in wide swathes of territory that had been devastated by the Nazi occupation. Unsurprisingly, party members were expected to play a key role in combating the country's social ills, both during the late Stalin years (when they were expected to be loyal followers of the regime's dictates) and during the Khrushchev era (when they were often called on to mobilize the broader public against violators of "the norms of socialist life"). The High Title of a Communist builds on recent literature emphasizing the importance of the war in Soviet history and suggesting that there were more continuities between the late Stalin years and the Khrushchev era than Soviet political rhetoric would suggest-demonstrating that as the regime confronted new crises and new adversaries in the postwar years, it began to view Soviet citizens and Communists in a new light. 28 Third, the Soviet regime's evolving attitude to repression and violence shaped the values and behaviors it expected of its citizens in subtle and surprising ways. The regime's treatment of the population could be harsh and draconian in the early postwar years, 29 but party members were often spared the brunt of the regime's repressive policies. In fact, even before Joseph Stalin's death, local party organizations had largely quit seeking out alien elements and hidden enemies within their ranks and punishing Communists whose views were politically unorthodox. At the same time, as Cynthia Hooper has shown, they began to discourage rank-and-file Communists from participating in some of the more destabilizing activities of the 1920s and 1930s, such as the uncontrolled denunciation of their peers.30 In many ways, it seems, party leaders of the late 1940s and early 1950s had quit worrying about what Communists thought as long as they did what they were told-a stark contrast with party practices of the 1920s and 1930s. What's more, the number of expulsions from the party for any reason declined sharply following the formal abolition of the mass purge at the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939, weakening one of the regime's most important tools for shaping the values and behavior of the Soviet elite. In the aftermath of Stalin's death, the party leadership both confirmed and extended these changes, formally repudiating the crimes of the past, changing many of the practices associated with party discipline, and emphasizing the use of "persuasion'' (ubezhdenie) over "compulsion" (prinuzhdenie) and of "education'' (vospitanie) over punishment and exclusion.J' These changes had a dramatic impact on how the regime both defined and enforced the party's informal code of conduct, leading to a greater focus on the need for Communists and other "builders of communism" to directly challenge the misconduct of their peers through renewed efforts at persuasion and education. The Khrushchev-era Soviet regime was never as liberal or as open-minded as its rhetoric proclaimed, of course; many of its reforms were motivated as much by Khrushchev's political needs as they were by his supposed liberalism,32 and even its efforts to mobilize Communists to "persuade" their peers to reform their behavior were often extremely coercive in their own way, as shown in

Introduction

9

chapters 5 and 6. Nevertheless, the party leadership under Khrushchev greatly curtailed the rate of expulsion from its ranks and softened its view of political misconduct, and its efforts to repudiate top-down repression led to renewed efforts to mobilize Communists and other citizens for political action and social change from below. During the 1950s and 196os, there was a sharp uptick in the publication of books and pamphlets explaining how Communists and other citizens should behave in their everyday life. 33 At the same time, official sources urged Communists to speak out against misconduct by their comrades and to voluntarily police the behavior of their peers, rather than limit the policing of society to the coercive actions of state institutions. The complex nature of Khrushchevcera party discipline is illustrated by the seemingly paradoxical fact that the number of Communists expelled for misconduct each year fell to an alltime low at the same time that party discussions of how citizens should behave became more intense than they had been in decades. These three changes helped to make the twenty years after the war an important transitional period in the history of the Communist Party, as party leaders grappled with the high-stakes issue of how to shape the values and behavior of the country's Communists. On one level, Soviet leaders cared about party discipline because they wanted to ensure that party members were an activist force ready to transform society and to implement the government's policies, whether by fighting to increase economic production or by speaking out against the "vestiges of capitalism" they observed in their everyday lives. (The desire to maintain the party as an effective institution sometimes gave local leaders a perverse incentive to avoid in-depth misconduct investigations-out of the fear that they would discredit the Communist Party among the population at large-but it also inspired low-level party organizations to constantly monitor the behavior of their members.) On a deeper level, Soviet leaders wanted all the country's citizens-including party members-to develop a value system that was free of the materialism, capitalism, and greed they observed in the West, but which would result in behavior that was less militant and easier to control than that of Communists in the era of the purges (or in the China of the Cultural Revolution). 34 Discussions of party discipline, then, were often linked to discussions about the need to shape the "consciousness" (soznatel'nost) of the population while eliminating "vestiges of the past" such as hooliganism, alcohol abuse, and child abandonment.35 These were extremely ambitious goals, touching on the very heart of the Communist program. In the decades after 1964, however, corruption and administrative malfeasance became even more common in the Soviet political system,36 the population's cynicism about their leaders grew even greater, and the party lost much of its activist spirit and its power to mobilize the population. The years from 1945 to 1964 were therefore the period in which the Soviet Union made a gradual, complicated transition from a revolutionary regime into a more conservative, bureaucratic government, and in which Nikita Khrushchev made

10

Introduction

a final effort to revitalize the Communist Party and ensure that its values took root throughout society. The party's efforts to redefine and enforce "the norms of socialist life" and the rules of behavior for the Soviet elite are an important part of that larger story.

Overview and Methodology For the first forty-four years of its seventy-four-year history in power, the Communist Party did not have a formal code of conduct for its members, limiting its formal explication of party ethics to a few brief articles in the party charter and largely leaving the task of defining the party's behavioral norms to propagandists and control organs. 37 In 1961, the party's Twenty-Second Congress finally enacted a code that provided guidance on good behavior for Communists and other citizens-the twelve-point Moral Code of the Builder of Communism-but even then, the principles of proper behavior promoted by the regime were often quite vague. 38 The High Title of a Communist, then, analyzes the changing values of the postwar Soviet regime by looking at cases in which local party organizations debated the misconduct of their members and by comparing the lessons drawn from those cases to the rhetoric used in Soviet newspapers, periodicals, ethical and political tracts, and party publications. In particular, it is based on three main types of archival sources: the records of the Committee of Party Control (KPK) in Moscow, which heard the appeals of expelled Communists from throughout the country, oversaw its own investigations, and produced a long series of statistical and informational reports on party discipline; 39 the files of other central party institutions, such as the Central Committee; and the protocols of party organizations at the local and provincial levels, where the fate of accused Communists was decided. More specifically, this book makes use of documents from provincial party archives in the cities of Tver' and Perm: The first of these cities, located about 120 miles northwest of Moscow, was known as Kalinin from 1931 to 1990, while Perm' (the easternmost city in Europe, situated in the foothills of the Urals) was known as Molotov from 1940 until1958; both of these cities were mid-sized provincial centers during the Stalin and Khrushchev eras, with a considerable industrial base, a substantial agricultural sector, and a sizable party organization. The heart of this book's source base consists of the records of Communist Party organizations at the local and provincial level. Expulsion cases were decided by the provincial party committee and its party collegium, whose records included hearing transcripts, reports by investigators, written statements by accused Communists, denunciation letters, documents forwarded to the provincial leadership by lower-level party organizations, correspondence with the procuracy and other state organs, and workplace reference letters and autobiographies describing the life of the accused Communist. These sources

Introduction

ll

provide a detailed and nuanced picture of postwar Soviet life, highlighting both the ways that Communists behaved and the manner in which this behavior was generally understood by other party members. These records are not perfect, however. There were undoubtedly cases in which a Communist was falsely accused of a crime and expelled from the party unjustly, or in which the testimony of a Communist's peers was dishonest, inaccurate, or misleading. It appears, however, that such cases were most likely when they dealt with high-ranking officials and internal party politics, and even then, party discipline records give a clear sense of how party organizations defined the rhetoric of party ethics and the rules of everyday behavior for Communists. Questions of morality and ethics-and of the proper role of a Communist in Soviet societywere inescapable features of everyday life. The complexity of the party disciplinary system can be explained in part by the system's objectives and goals. As shown in chapter 1, the Soviet Union's postwar system of party discipline was based on a shifting balance between three main objectives: the punishment and purging of the unworthy, the spread of the party's values throughout the country's ruling classes, and the control of the regime's political agents (including both office-holders and rank-andfile Communists). These goals were distinct, but sometimes competed with each other, and their relative importance changed over time. Even so, most of the scholarship dealing with party discipline-including much of the political science literature on the Communist Party-has focused on just one of these objectives, the cleansing and purging of the ruling party. In his classic 1956 work The Permanent Purge, for example, Zbigniew Brzezinski emphasized the importance of the purge in the Soviet political system: Totalitarianism needs the purge. Disloyal and potentially deviant individuals or groups must be unmasked and their followers liquidated. The tensions, the conflicts, and the struggles within the totalitarian system must somehow be released or absorbed lest they erupt into disintegrating violence. The problems of promotion and circulation of the elite must be solved within the monolithic framework of a system which eliminates freedom of choice and free competition. Corrupt and careerist elements must be weeded out periodically in order to maintain revolutionary fervor. The purposes of the purge are accordingly many and varied, and the need for it ever present. The purge thus becomes permanent. 40 Although this passage captures a common-sense understanding of the motivations behind expulsion, The High Title of a Communist argues that the postwar regime was less intent on the unmasking of disloyal Communists and the liquidation of enemies than this quotation suggests, and focuses more closely on other factors mentioned by Brzezinski (such as the circulation of elites and the struggle with corruption).

12

Introduction

Moreover, although this book recognizes all of the goals of the party disciplinary system, it devotes particular attention to the objective that was typically emphasized by party sources: spreading the values of the Soviet regime and shaping the world view of the population. In Russian, this goal was often described using the word vospitanie-a difficult-to-translate term often rendered in English as "education;' "moral education;' or "upbringing;' which refers to efforts to shape citizens' personalities, values, and world views through methods like the formal educational system, parenting, and the propaganda work of the party and Komsomol.4' Communists were a particularly fruitful target for efforts at vospitanie, since they were meant to be model citizens: they were expected to set an example for other members of Soviet society, to play a "vanguard role" in production and public life, and to agitate amongst the population for the regime's policies and values. As a result, shaping the behavior of Communists through censure and the threat of expulsion was a way to indirectly shape the behavior of other citizens; discussing the misconduct of Communists in a public (or semi-public) setting sent a message to all citizens about the types of behavior expected by the regime. Party sources often suggested that the goals of punishment and vospitanie were in conflict-and that Stalin-era party organizations had focused on the harsh punishment of their members at the expense of their educational efforts-but, as many scholars have noted, the themes of repression and reeducation have always been interwoven in Soviet historyY Many Soviet efforts at "education"-including, for instance, the mobilization of Communists to confront peers who violated "the norms of socialist communal life" -therefore represented new efforts to punish, stigmatize, and coerce wrongdoers into changing their way of life. The High Title of a Communist, then, is a close examination of the regime's efforts to shape the values of the population through party discipline, while analyzing the ways in which the government's changing attitude toward repression has complicated and reshaped its efforts at transforming society's behavioral norms. Political scientists (especially in the 1960s and 1970s) have also linked party discipline to the regime's efforts at propaganda and indoctrination, 43 and a more recent group of scholars has examined the regime's efforts to shape the values of the population in less overtly political ways. 44 Vadim Volkov and David Hoffmann, for example, have applied Norbert Elias's theory of the "civilizing process" to Stalin's USSR, examining the ways the regime sought to spread a uniform system of conduct among the members of the elite. 45 This volume builds on their work, while focusing less on the spread of expert opinions about personal hygiene and of elite notions of culturedness and more on the regime's formal efforts to enforce its behavioral norms. The High Title of a Communist therefore deals with party investigations concerning a wide variety of misconduct, as a way to trace the changing values of the regime, to examine the impact of changes in regime values on the country's elite, and to look at how the regime's expectations of Communists evolved as the party's role in Soviet society changed. A majority of the book is organized thematically.

Introduction

13

The book's first chapter is an overview of the role of the Communist Party and its disciplinary system within Soviet society and politics, analyzing both the party's changing nature and the ways that its evolution affected the regime's expectations of Communists. In particular, chapter 1 examines the long-term effects of the Eighteenth Party Congress on the inner workings of the party. When the congress convened in 1939, it made two changes to the party charter that would transform both the party's demographics and its disciplinary system for years to come: it ended the practice of the periodic mass purge and made it easier for white-collar workers to join the party. Beginning in 1939, party organizations could no longer embark on a simultaneous investigation of the credentials and behavior of all of their members; they would instead investigate their members on a case-by-case basis, looking into the conduct and background of their members only in response to specific accusations of wrongdoing. From then onward, party discipline investigations were an everyday part of the party's organizational life and a valuable tool for the regime in shaping the values of Communists. The focus of the book's next two chapters is the party's changing attitude toward the political loyalty of Communists and the hunt for internal enemies. Chapter 2 looks at the final mass purge in the party's history-the expulsion of 15o,ooo Communists who had either spent time as German prisoners of war or lived in Nazi-occupied territory. These cases highlight the regime's fear that its members had not fully absorbed the party's values, focusing not on the search for enemies and traitors, but on the lack of discipline, initiative, and fortitude of many of the country's Communists in the face of a daunting foreign threat. A good Communist was expected to place the party and its interests ahead of his own life, but many wartime party members had allegedly failed in this duty-sparking worries about "passivity" and the need for greater discipline that would continue into the postwar years. Chapter 3 investigates the place of political loyalty and ideological orthodoxy in the regime's vision of the ideal Communist, arguing that a Communist's political beliefs played a surprisingly small role in postwar party discussions. Even before the death of Stalin, during a time when non-Communists were frequently repressed by the regime, party organizations had largely quit investigating their members for engaging in "anti-Soviet conversations" or making "anti-Soviet comments" and no longer assumed that a party member who concealed his kulak origins was a hidden enemy who needed to be unveiled. Nikita Khrushchev and his allies claimed credit for eliminating the Stalinist persecution of Communists for "political reasons;' but this persecution had largely ended before 1953. Although it changed the lives of thousands of 1930s purge victims for the better, Khrushchev's rehabilitation drive therefore played less of a role in ending the party's pursuit of internal political wrongdoers than the scholarly literature often assumes. Chapter 4 looks at one of the most important fronts in the party's war on wrongdoing by its members: the struggle with corruption and administrative

14

Introduction

misconduct. In a majority of the years covered by this volume, more Communists were expelled for "the abuse of a service position toward personal goals" (zloupotreblenie sluzhebnym polozheniem v lichnykh tseliakh) than for any other infraction; party members disciplined for this offense were guilty of a wide variety of loosely linked crimes, including embezzlement, the theft of state property, and bribe-taking. Chapter 4 examines the party's struggle with administrative misconduct in the context of two larger phenomena: the regime's desire to increase its control over officialdom (especially in the midst of the postwar economic crisis) and the growing identification of Communists with the state administration. The first of these trends created an incentive for party organizations to crack down on Communists whose self-interested actions threatened their control over the economy, but the latter made the party's struggle with corruption more difficult. In the Khrushchev years, party leaders made a push to mobilize angry citizens against the corruption of local party leaders, but the party's growing distaste for expulsion made this campaign extremely difficult to enforce. The High Title of a Communist concludes with two chapters on the party's attitude toward misconduct in a Communist's everyday life. Chapter 5 looks at the rise of misconduct cases involving adultery and child abandonment, while chapter 6 examines the party's efforts to stamp out drunkenness among its members. In both cases, concerns about party members' "unworthy conduct in everyday life" began growing in the midst of the demographic and economic turmoil left by World War II, increased gradually during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and rose in intensity during the Khrushchev years, as the regime sought to mobilize its citizens against all violations of"the norms of socialist life:' Over time, the party's definition of misconduct became broader, as it urged all its memhers to speak out whenever they witnessed fellow citizens threatening public order or failing in the upbringing of their children. At the same time, however, much of the initiative in the struggle with disorder shifted from the Communist Party membership to the population at large. Together, these chapters tell the story of a political party in a state of flux, struggling to forge an identity for itself and a value system for its members that would preserve its special role in Soviet society and politics. This struggle was often difficult, but the stakes could not have been higher.

CHAPTER ONE

The Communist Party and Its System of Internal Discipline in the Postwar Years

T

H E C 0 M M U N I S T p A R T Y S T 0 0 D at the center of the Soviet political system from the October Revolution of 1917 until the collapse of the USSR in 1991, serving (in the words of the 1961 party charter) as the "leading and directing force in Soviet society:'• Although it originated as a revolutionary movement of the working class and the intelligentsia, in the years after 1917 the party came to encompass the country's entire political elite and its most prominent citizens; in the decades after World War II, its ranks included between 3 and 5 percent of the Soviet population and around 10 percent of the USSR's adult men. 2 Many different types of people belonged to the party, including rank-and-file workers, party activists, economic administrators, political office-holders, citizens who aspired to an administrative career, and workers from all fields who hoped to rise to the top of their profession. 3 Lenin famously hailed the party as "the mind, honor, and conscience of our era:' 4 Given the party's political significance and activist rhetoric, it is no surprise that the regime set a very high standard for Communists in their personal, professional, and public conduct. In 1960, a handbook for the leaders of party cells spelled out some of the party's expectations of its members:

A Communist is a political fighter, an instigator, a leader. He must live by high ideals and see to every matter entrusted to him and to every matter of public or state importance that may seem unimportant at first glance. We must always remember that the party is an educator of the people. It acts in this way not only by promoting high Communist ideals and principles among the masses, but by requiring each member to be an example, a role model for imitation. Among the people the word "Communist" is always welcomed and perceived as a symbol of courage, justice, and moral purity. Party organizations educate their members above all else in these qualities, and severely call to account those who show moral unsteadiness and those who ignore the established norms of party ethics.... A Communist is obliged to be an active fighter for the implementation of party decisions; to serve as an example in labor, study, and public life; to strengthen ties with the masses daily; to observe party and state discipline; to practice self-criticism and criticism from below; and to identify insufficiencies in work and seek to eliminate them. 5

16

Chapter One

From the revolution onward, in short, party rhetoric emphasized the many demands placed upon the members of the party. As a 1962 pamphlet declared, ''A Communist remains a Communist always and everywhere-an active fighter for the party, a leader of the masses:' 6 The Communist Party was not a static institution, however. In the decades after World War II, it went through a dramatic shift in both its size and its composition, which subtly changed both the role of party organizations in Soviet society and the party's expectations for its members. More specifically, party membership became less closely connected to membership in the proletariat and more closely linked to status as a white-collar worker-a change that helped both to connect the party to the state's administrative apparatus and to decrease the regime's emphasis on the social and ideological purity of the party membership. The party also grew dramatically in size, and although it never became a mass movement open to all comers, its leaders grew less inclined to expel errant Communists from the ranks and more inclined to expand the party's membership and build its infrastructure/ These changes had a powerful impact on the regime's view of the ideal Communist, but one thing remained constant: the regime's high expectations for the behavior of party members. The party's internal disciplinary system entered the picture when Communists failed to meet those expectations. In the decades after World War II, then, the processes of expulsion and censure both reflected the party's changing nature and represented an attempt by the regime to shape the values and behavior of the party membership. After the mass purge was eliminated in the late 1930s, misconduct investigations and hearings became a regular, everyday aspect of the work of local party organizations. Communists were expected to take part in the investigation of their comrades and in the discussion of their peers' behavior; misconduct hearings were meant to teach all Communists-those charged with misconduct and those judging the accused-about the proper role and behavior of a party member, giving party discipline an important place in the regime's system of vospitanie, or moral education. Nevertheless, as the party's role in Soviet society evolved, its disciplinary system became less focused on the expulsion and purging of the unworthy, complicating the regime's goal of defining and enforcing a clear identity and behavioral code for the country's Communists. Although the good Communist remained an important Soviet ideal, the definition of an ideal Communist evolved over time, losing much of its clarity and distinctiveness as the party entered a new era.

The Party's Role in Soviet Society The Communist Party was in a period of transition during the two decades between World War II and the ouster of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964. Early in

The Communist Party and Its System ofInternal Discipline in the Postwar Years

l7

its history, before the revolution itself, the party's identity had been clear: it was a "vanguard of the proletariat;' a small and disciplined group dedicated to bringing about a revolution on behalf of the empire's working class. This identity had a clear impact on the shape of the party in the two decades following 1917. The Communist Party continued to be small and tightly disciplined, and its official identity remained close to that of the proletariat; the movement was seen as a "mass party of the working class" that would strive to implement the regime's policies while fighting to transform the economy and society at large. 8 From 1945 onward, however, the party's identity was in a state of flux, largely due to two changes: the end of the Great Purges and the growth in party membership sparked by the war. These changes made the party larger, less proletarian, less activist, and more closely linked to the USSR's administrative apparatus. In March 1939, as the Great Purges ended, the party's Eighteenth Congress announced two major changes to the party charter that had a dramatic effect on the movement's identity in the decades that followed. First, until that year the party had required would-be Communists from different social classes to collect different numbers of recommendation letters from party members in order to join the party, and had required Communists of different classes to spend different lengths of time as candidate members before they were admitted to full membership; these policies made it harder for white-collar workers (sluzhashchie) to join the party. Beginning in 1939, however, all Soviet citizens seeking party membership were subject to the same admission requirements. 9 Party sources emphasized that many white-collar workers had proletarian roots (and were simply workers and peasants who had been promoted to management), but the 1939 change in admission requirements nevertheless changed the party's notion of the typical Communist and weakened the traditional link between the party and the working class. In the late 1930s, in fact, party rhetoric began to focus less on the need to recruit workers and more on the desirability of admitting "the best people" from all social classes.' 0 Second, the Eighteenth Party Congress also amended the party charter to abolish the practice of mass purges (chistki), instead proclaiming the need to judge misconduct by Communists on "an individual basis" and to guarantee the "careful" examination of an accused Communist's behavior." This change was, if anything, even more far-reaching than the party's new admission policy, but it was introduced in a surprisingly low-key way. The congress quietly deleted the provision in the previous party charter that allowed the Central Committee to organize purges for "the systematic cleansing of the party;' announcing (in the resolution amending the charter) that "periodic mass party purges must be abolished:' The resolution also explained why purging was no longer appropriate, noting that "capitalist elements" in the USSR had been "liquidated" since the mass purge was first proposed in the 1920s, that mass purges had often failed to identify and expel the "hostile elements" who had entered the party, that

18

Chapter One

innocent Communists had been unfairly expelled during the 1930s, and that the use of purges "excludes the possibility of an individualized approach to party members-the only correct approach-and replaces it with an undiscriminating, stereotyped approach:' 12 Taken at face value, then, the 1939 charter was a victory for party democracy and a guarantee against the excesses of the 1930s, informing Communists throughout the USSR that the Great Terror had ended; it included a new summary of the rights of party members and a provision clarifying that accused Communists could continue participating in the life of their party organization until an obkom endorsed their expulsion.'3 Nevertheless, the resolution's mild tone weakened this message. The abolition of the mass purge was buried in the middle of a lengthy resolution that included an endorsement of the post-1920 liquidation of class enemies, signaling to Communists that the terror of the 1930s had ended but presumably leaving them unconvinced that the mass purge had truly been abolished forever. The abolition of the mass purge reshaped the party's internal functioning in two main ways. First, it decreased the number of Communists expelled from the party. In the purges of the 1920s and 1930s, it was not uncommon for the party to expel10 percent or more of its members at once, with a 21 percent drop during the 1921 purge and an even larger decrease in the 1933-1934 purge;'4 by contrast, the party never expelled more than 3 percent of its members in any year after World War Il.' 5 Second, the abolition of the purge represented a sharp decline in the leadership's interest in the "purity" of the party membership. After all, many prewar purges were motivated by the fear that the party was being "contaminated" by the inclusion of sluzhashchie, "alien elements;' careerists, opportunists, and others who were not sufficiently proletarian. (The 1929 purge, for instance, raised the percentage of workers in the party from 61.1 percent to 68.5 percent.)'6 Even in the years immediately preceding the war, when sluzhashchie made up less than a third of the party, a majority of expelled Communists were white-collar workers (6o.8 percent in 1939 and 55-14 percent in 1940).'7 After the war, by contrast, the regime lost much of its interest in the party's class purity, and the proportion of white-collar workers among expelled Communists became smaller than their share of the overall party membership. '8 These changes were solidified and then extended by mass admissions to the party during World War II. The party grew dramatically during these years, reaching a level of 5·7 million members in 1945-a total three times greater than in 1938 and roughly 1.5 times greater than in 1941. {This increase is especially impressive given the high death toll left by the war-808,589 Communists were killed in 1941 alone.)'9 This rapid growth had two main effects on the party as an institution. First, there were now more Communists in the USSR than there had ever been before, and although the party was never a mass movement open to all, its growth outstripped that of the overall population. Second, the party's wartime growth resulted in a movement whose members were very different from their prewar predecessors in social class, age, and experience. In 1938, only

The Communist Party and Its System of Internal Discipline iti the Postwar Years

19

TABLE 1 -Communist Party Membership by Year, 1938-1964 YEAR

I

FuLL

CANDIDATE

ALL

FEMALE

PERCENT

MEMBERS

MEMBERS

COMMUNISTS

CoMMUNISTS

WOMEN

1938

1,405,879

514,213

1,920,002

286,273

14.9%

1939

1,514,181

792,292

2,306,973

333,821

14.5%

1940

1,982,743

1,417,232

3,339,975

490,244

14.4%

1941

2,490,479

1,381,986

3,872,465

575,853

14.9%

1942

2,155,336

908,540

3,063,876

442,321

14.4%

1943

2,451,411

1,403,190

3.854,701

567,354

14.7%

1944

3,126,627

1,791,934

4,918,561

784,280

15.9%

1945

3,965,530

1,794,839

5,760,369

969,289

16.8%

1946

4,127, 689

1,383,173

5,510,862

1,033,115

18.7%

1947

4,774,886

1,277,Dl5

6,051,901

1,102,424

18.2%

1948

5,181,199

1,209,082

6,390,281

1,143,187

17.9%

1949

5,334,811

1,017,761

6,352,572

1,141,086

18.0%

1950

5,510,787

829,396

6,340,183

1,160,938

18.3%

1951

5,658,577

804,398

6,462,975

1,206,203

18.7%

1952

5,853,200

854,339

6,707,539

1,276,560

19.0%

1953

6,067,027

830,197

6,897,224

1,335,336

19.4%

1954

6,402,284

462,579

6,864,863

1,346,971

19.6%

1955

6,610,238

346,867

6,957,105

1,364,713

19.6%

1956

6,767,644

405,877

7,173,521

1,414,456

1957

7,001,114

493,459

7,494,573

1,477.678

19.7%

1958

7,296,559

546,637

7,843,196

1,533,078

19.5%

1959

7,622,356

616,775

8,239,131

1,605,804

19.5%

1960

8,017,249

691,418

8,708,667

1,692,164

19.4%

1961

8,472,396

803,430

9,275,826

1,809,688

19.5%

1962

9,051,934

839,134

9,891,068

1,942,080

19.6%

1963

9,581,149

806,047

10,387,196

2,050,371

19.7%

1964

10,182,916

839,453

11,022,369

2,195,004

19.9%

0

19.7%

Spravochnik "KPSS v tsifrakh" na 1 ianvaria 1962 g (RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 26,!. 21) and "KPSS v tsifrakh 1961-1964 gody)," Partiinaia zhizn', May 1965, 8-17.

20

Chapter One

10.9 percent of party members had been white-collar workers; that total leapt to 34.1 percent in 1941 and to 46.7 percent in 1945. 20 In 1941 only 8.9 percent of Communists were under the age of twenty-five-a proportion that reached 18.3 percent in 1946. 21 By the end of World War II, in short, a small party dominated

by workers had tripled in size and become dominated by white-collar veterans, who often saw "the Great Patriotic War" (and not the October Revolution) as the key event in their political development. These changes in the party's composition and size remained a fact of Soviet life in the years that followed. Before the war, the party's size had frequently fluctuated-generally trending upward, but with occasional sharp drops in membership; after the war, the party maintained its large size, increasing its membership by roughly 20 percent between 1945 and 1953 despite periodic efforts to rein in growth and ensure that the party maintained high standards in its admissions. 23 At the same time, the share of white-collar workers in the party experienced slow but steady growth in the late Stalin years, rising from 46.7 percent in 1945 to a bare majority (50.1 percent) at the time of Stalin's death. 24 22

TABLE 2- The Class Breakdown of Communists, 1946-1964 YEAR

WORKERS

PEASANTS

SLUZHASHCHIE

(% OF TOTAL PARTY

(% OF TOTAL PARTY

(% OF TOTAL PARTY

MEMBERSHIP)

MEMBERSHIP)

MEMBERSHIP)

1946

1,865,126 {33.85%)

1,023,903 (18.58%)

2,621,833 (47.58%)

1947

2,041,317 {33.73%)

1,091,362 (18.03%)

2,919,222 (48.24%)

1948

2,125,910 {33.27%)

1,173,180 (18.36%)

3,091,191 (48.37%)

1949

2,101,527 (33.60%)

1,160,465 (18.27%)

3,090,580 (48.65%)

1950

2,084,714 (32.88%)

1,148,753 (18.12%)

3,106,716 (49.00%)

1951

2,107,453 (32.61%)

1,165,208 {18.03%)

3,190,314 (49.36%)

1952

2,162,059 (30.44%)

1,206,668 (16.99%)

3,338,812 (49.78%)

1953

2,213,667 (32.10%)

1,226,040 (17.78%)

3,457,517 (50.13%)

1961

35.0%

17.3%

47.7%

1964

37.3%

16.5%

46.2%

RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 26,1. 25.

The Communist Party and Its System ofInternal Discipline in the Postwar Years

2l

Party rhetoric deemphasized these changes-pointing out, with some accuracy, that many of the white-collar workers within the party came from a proletarian background2 s-but in many ways, the Communist Party became the party of the administrative apparatus, not of the proletariat. In 1952, the party's Nineteenth Congress even adopted a new charter whose opening words defined the movement as a "voluntary, militant union oflike-minded Communists, organized of people of the working class, toiling peasants, and the working intelligentsia;'26 rather than as the leading segment of the proletariat. In the eleven years that followed Stalin's death, the party leadership under Nikita Khrushchev struggled with this legacy. On the one hand, Khrushchev and his allies endorsed the concept of a large party membership and even increased the party's size by 59.8 percent between 1953 and 1964-a rate that exceeded both the growth of the population as a whole under Khrushchev and the growth of the party in the late Stalin years. 27 On the other hand, the leadership was clearly concerned with the party's growing bureaucratization and its increased ties to the administrative apparatus. Party leaders therefore sought to increase the percentage of Communists who came from the peasantry and the working class, to shake up and revitalize the party bureaucracy, and to make rank-and-file party members more of an activist force for the transformation of the country. These reforms had important consequences for how the leadership viewed the ideal Communist, but they arguably represented incremental changes to a party that had been forever transformed by the end of the purges and World War II.

FIGURE 1-Communist Party Membership, 1938-1964 -

Communists

2 0 00 0\ 0 .... "' ~ "' ~ ~

....

...,. "' .... "'

".... ....

-

...., ...,.

.... "'

...,. ~ ..,., ..,., ..,., :il ::0 \() \() ::2: ~ ...,. ...,. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 00

0

"' "'

N

"' "' "' "' ""' "' "' \()

00

22

Chapter One

The most significant change in the Communist Party under Khrushchev was a sizable increase in the number of party members, from around 6.9 million in 1953 to u million in 1964. 28 This represented a growth rate of just under 6o percent-a rate nearly four times greater than that of the population as a whole-and resulted in the largest absolute number of new recruits in the party's history up to that time. 29 By 1959, just under 4 percent of the Soviet population belonged to the party, and in certain subgroups, the proportion was even higher: although only 2.1 percent of women over the age of twenty belonged to the party, 12.2 percent of adult men were Communists.30 The party's expansion was driven not just by the Khrushchev-era leadership's desire to recruit more members, but by its decision to discourage expulsion from the party-a political change intended to decrease the overt repression of the Stalin years that also helped shape the size and composition of the party. The Khrushchev-era growth of the party was not intended as a blind continuation of late Stalinist admission policies, however: it was part of a larger populist program of making the party a more activist and revolutionary force in Soviet politics and society. That effort began in the immediate aftermath of Stalin's death with several campaigns to purge the party of dead wood and ensure that all Communists were disciplined men and women ready to be mobilized behind new initiatives at a moment's notice. In 1953 and 1954, for instance, party organizations took advantage of a new clause in the party charter to expel roughly 89,364 candidate members who had been in the party for years without being able to achieve full membership.J' In 1954, party organizations ruled that the membership of 44,168 Communists had "automatically lapsed" because they had not been diligent enough in paying dues or attending meetings-a total roughly three times the average for past years, at a time when the expulsion rate was declining overallY These changes were accompanied by several campaigns intended to fight the growing bureaucratization of the party and to mobilize its membership as a center of activism. In the fall of 1953, for example, Khrushchev addressed the September Plenum of the Central Committee with a call for tens of thousands of party members to leave their homes and careers, move to the countryside, and become kolkhoz chairmen. Khrushchev hoped to achieve two important goals: strengthening the party in rural areas and transforming it into an activist army that could be mobilized for social change. He described his hypothetical volunteers with the historically resonant nickname "the thirty-thousanders:' 33 (The more famous Virgin Lands campaign pursued similar goals at roughly the same time.) 34 In January 1954, the Soviet leadership launched a campaign against "bureaucratism;' seeking to strengthen the work of the party and state apparatus. 35 Most significantly, Khrushchev launched a campaign in late 1958 to reform the party apparatus on the basis of "the public principles" (obshchestvennye nachala), by which non-professional party activists would voluntarily take on administrative work that was normally conducted by salaried officials,

The Communist Party and Its System ofInternal Discipline in the Postwar Years

23

forming new committees and councils to fight bureaucracy and mobilize activists to expand economic production.36 Together, these campaigns were intended to further the Khrushchev-era regime's populist vision of a party that took its strength not from the bureaucracy, but from the working population. 37 These reforms were accompanied by one of Khrushchev's signature initiatives: a push to increase the proportion of the Communist Party composed of workers and peasants, rather than administrative personnel and white-collar workers. Beginning in 1954, Khrushchev and his allies criticized the more restrictive admission policies of the late Stalin years, which made it relatively difficult for workers to join the party, and the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 called on local party organizations to select new Communists "first of all from the ranks of workers and kolkhozniki:' 38 These policies made a difference: the percentage of new Communists who came from the working class rose from 27.2 percent between 1952 and 1955 to 40.6 percent between 1956 and 1961 and 47.6 percent between 1962 and 1966. The percentage of sluzhashchie among new members dropped from 56·4 percent to 40.0 percent to 38-4 percent during the same period. 39 Khrushchev and his allies reformed the party in a final way as well: they repudiated the crimes of the Stalin era and redefined the regime's notion of the enemy. Khrushchev was perhaps most famous for denouncing his predecessor in his so-called "Secret Speech'' at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956;40 under his leadership, censorship was loosened, thousands of Communists expelled from the party during the 1930s were restored to its ranks, and millions of prisoners were released from the Gulag. These changes had their biggest impact outside the party, but they changed the internal workings of party organizations as well: as will be discussed in later chapters of this book, party rhetoric began to emphasize that expulsion was a punishment of last resort, the party charter was amended to require a two-thirds vote of the primary party organization for a Communist's expulsion, and expulsion for political offenses became even less common. These changes reaffirmed the party's declining interest in the "purity" ofits membership rolls and ensured that expelled Communists would essentially never be seen as "enemies" again, while facilitating another of Khrushchev's goals-expanding the party. The many strands of Khrushchev's program came together in the early 196os, when the party leadership unveiled a new vision of the Communist Party as a "party of the entire people" (partiia vsego naroda)Y The new party program summed up this slogan when it declared that "the Communist Party of the working class has become the vanguard of the Soviet people, a party of the entire people, and has extended its guiding influence to all spheres of public life:' 42 The slogan was based on three main ideas: that all the country's social classes were now united behind the party's ideology, that the class composition of the party reflected the overall class composition of society, and that the role and size of the party were growing as the Soviet Union approached the communist stage

24

Chapter One

of development. The party leadership intended this new formulation to be a populist reaffirmation of the party's strength, but the slogan "party of the entire people" instead highlighted the postwar party's many internal tensions and contradictions. Consider, for example, a May 1962 article in the journal Kommunist by Frol Kozlov, a politician often seen as Khrushchev's favored successor. Kozlov's article, "The CPSU-Party of the Entire People;' was full of confident rhetoric about the fast-approaching advent of communism and the growing role of the party. Kozlov hailed the USSR for raising living standards, constructing unprecedented amounts of new housing, and transforming the educational system, declaring that because of the party's "selfless struggle for the happiness of the people;' its "ideology and aims had become the ideology and aims of every social group in society:'43 He added a justification for the party's class breakdown, arguing-incorrectly-that since the triumph of socialism in the 1930s, the party's class composition had come to resemble that of society at large. 44 (In actuality, the proportion of white-collar workers in the party was significantly greater than in the population as a whole.) 45 But Kozlov's article also included an undercurrent of concern about the state of the party. "If you were to listen to the insinuations of the anti -Communist press about the role of party members in the Soviet Union, you would think that every Communist had to be some sort of manager, big or small;' Kozlov noted at one point, before pointing out that the proportion of Communists working in industry who were administrative personnel had actually fallen in recent years. 46 Kozlov's article, in short, alternated between triumphant declarations about the transformation of Soviet society and defensive comments about the party's working-class essence. Kozlov was right to be concerned. Although the regime's rhetoric hailed the return of"Leninism'' to Soviet life, the Khrushchev-era party was much closer to the party of the late 1940s and early 1950s than it was to its prewar predecessor; Khrushchev's impact on the party's structure and membership was sometimes superficial and was usually smaller than the regime's rhetoric proclaimed. The party did grow dramatically in size, but as large as the increase was in absolute terms, it was smaller in proportional terms than under some past recruitment drives. More importantly, Khrushchev-era efforts to reshape the party's demographics also fell short of their goals. By 1964, only 37·3 percent of the party came from the working class-an increase of 5 percent from 1953, but a much smaller proportion than before the war. The share of peasants within the party actually declined from 17.8 percent to 16.5 percent over the same period, and the proportion of white-collar workers in 1964 stood at a hefty 46.2 percentY Khrushchev had succeeded in making the party mildly more worker-friendly, but he was more adept at justifying the party's new social structure than he was at changing it. Khrushchev, in short, envisioned a return to the party's Leninist roots, but left its late Stalinist essence largely in place.

The Communist Party and Its System ofInternal Discipline in the Postwar Years

25

FIGURE 2-Communist Party Membership by Social Class, 1938-1962 -

Workers

-

Peasants

I I I White-collar workers

70

60 50

40 ''

30

'

#

'

''

''

20

10

'

#

''

'

Unofficial Roles of the Communist Party: Career Advancement and Networking

Frol Kozlov's article hinted at another series of tensions within the Communist Party: although it was intended as a vehicle for socialist activism, the party's identity and position in society were also shaped by its role as a recruitment organ for the regime. In the postwar years, after all, party membership was a prerequisite for nearly all important management positions and for advancement in most careers;48 as the political scientist Aryeh Unger has argued, most postwar Communists saw party membership as "a standard career requirement" and "an inevitable and long anticipated stage in life:'49 This change was closely linked to the growth of the party (since, as Jerry Hough has noted, the requirement that mid-level managers be Communists necessitated a large party),50 but it also reflected the party's increasingly white-collar character. The importance of party membership was always a fact of Soviet life, but it became greater after 1945 as the party's ranks were filled by white-collar workers and bureaucrats, sometimes giving the Communist Party the appearance of an exclusive club for members of the establishment, rather than a revolutionary force in society.

26

Chapter One

A wide variety of sources agree on the importance of the Communist Party for career advancement. Party membership gave young workers the mark of an up-and-comer and brought them into regular contact with their bosses at party meetings. As one Russian emigre explained to the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System (an interview project of the early 1950s), a Soviet citizen who wanted to be an administrator needed not just to join the party, but to be active in it. "If he is not active in the Party, the Party will not notice him so much, and the advance will be slower. He must be active in Party meetings, speak up, and so on;' the emigre explained.s' Other sources hint at the importance of the party as a source of social networking for would-be administrators, many of whom-as chapter 6 shows-needed to socialize and drink with their would-be colleagues if they hoped to advance in the party and on the job. This aspect of Communist party life is often invisible in official sources, but is alluded to in complaints by Communists that they were ostracized by colleagues when they refused to participate in their coworkers' drunken revelryY In general, party membership made the biggest practical difference for white-collar workers and would-be managers. Several Harvard Project interviewees emphasized that a Communist working in a shop would have a real advantage over his colleagues outside the party: "Say you have a little store in the Soviet Union and there are ten people working, and they are all the same. But among them one of them joins the party. Inside of a month he will be the director of the store;' one announced, exaggerating only a little.ll T. H. Rigby even recounted the story of a kolkhoznik who resisted joining the party because he wanted to continue working in agriculture and felt that party membership would force him to begin an administrative career. 54 In the creative professions, party membership could lead to membership in a professional group like a writers' union, another career necessity. The literary scholar Maurice Friedberg has noted that "the only people among the artists, musicians, and technical personnel of [the Odessa Opera's] staff to join the Party were those who aspired to rapid advancement or who were planning administrative careers, or who dreamt of the coveted title of'people's artist:"ss By the same token, a Communist who worked in the film industry told the Harvard Project that "if a man was a non-Party person, then his assistant had to be in the Party. The production manager was a Party man, the director always had to be a Party member:' 56 The party's role as a recruitment organ was present from the October Revolution onward, but it arguably grew as the postwar party membership became more closely identified with the country's "administrative, managerial, and technical elite:' 57 The party therefore took a hard line against careerism and opportunism throughout its history, but before 1939 its leaders often portrayed "opportunists" not as people who wanted to further their careers, but as class enemies intent on subverting the party.58 When early versions of the party charter listed the groups that should be purged, for example, they referred both to "double-dealers who deceive the party, conceal from it their real views, and wreck party policy" and

The Communist Party and Its System of Internal Discipline in the Postwar Years

27

to "careerists, self-seekers, and bureaucratic elements;' but the former group tended to get more attention. 59 The party's elimination of the mass purge and its decision to recruit larger numbers of white-collar workers fundamentally changed its calculus, however. In the postwar years, criticisms of "bureaucratic elements" within the party lost nearly all of their class connotations and began to be made in relatively apolitical terms, emphasizing red tape, cronyism, and opportunism more than internal efforts by class enemies to subvert the party. Strikingly, the party's status as a self-interested recruitment organ and social network does not seem to have been seriously threatened by Nikita Khrushchev's efforts to strengthen its populist, activist core. The party's role in selecting future managers and leaders was also intimately linked to another aspect of its internal culture: the gender breakdown of its membership. Although the party proclaimed itself a force for the liberation of women, its members were-by and large-men. The percentage of women in the party had risen rapidly in the years after the revolution before slowing its growth after the war, creeping from 16.8 percent to 19.9 percent between 1945 and 1964. 60 By 1959, more than 12 percent of adult men were Communists, compared to just 2 percent of adult women. 6 ' This disparity resulted from several factors, including the persistence of patriarchal attitudes in much of Soviet society, the fact that most Soviet citizens in positions of political or economic authority were men, and the fact that admission to the party often depended on networking and social interactions with party members in an overwhelmingly male world. In the years after the war, the party often looked like an old boy's club, complete with heavy drinking, casual sexism, and other stereotypically male behavior. The Communist Party was meant to be a force for revolution and an organization with high behavioral standards for its members, but its identity was often shaped by the values of the patriarchy and the bureaucracy. From the beginning of its history, then, there was a conflict between the party's stated values and the behavior of its more career-minded members.

The Individual Communist's Role in Soviet Society

As a result of these changes in the party's size and composition, the meaning of party membership became more conflicted and ambiguous than it had been before the war. Official documents had always defined membership in a prosaic manner: "Anyone who accepts the party's program, works in one of its organizations, complies with its resolutions, and pays party dues is considered a member of the party;' the 1939 party charter announced, using language that had been in place for decades. 62 But until1939, other provisions of the charter (like those outlining admission requirements) had emphasized the fact that the ideal Communist was a toiling laborer, most likely an industrial worker. In the years following 1945, as the party became less proletarian and more closely

28

Chapter One

linked to the state apparatus, the party's expectations of its members' behavior both became more explicit and more closely centered on fighting passivity, bureaucracy, and inertia. These changes are especially clear in the party charter's section on the "obligations and rights" of Communists. The 1939 version of the charter, for instance, required Communists • to work tirelessly to raise their consciousness and master the principles of Marxism-Leninism; • to strictly observe party discipline, to participate actively in the political life of the party and the country, and to carry out the policy of the party and the resolutions of party organs; • to be a model of compliance with labor and state discipline and to learn the techniques of their craft, constantly increasing their production and business skills; • to strengthen ties with the masses daily, to respond to the needs and demands of workers in a timely manner, and to explain the meaning of party policies and decisions to the non-party masses. 63 This language was both terse and traditionally minded; it emphasized ideology, discipline, and workplace concerns and was closely based on earlier versions of the charter. The total number of obligations was low, and the charter emphasized a reasonably limited vision of a Communist's duties to the movement, focusing on labor and close ties to the working masses. By contrast, the next version of the charter-enacted in 1952-made the regime's expectations of Communists more explicit and detailed while directly confronting problems connected to the party's bureaucratization. This revision was apparently spearheaded by Nikita Khrushchev (then the Moscow party chief), whose populist vision became even more prominent later in the 1950s, but it built on a number of growing trends in party life. 64 Much of the language of the 1939 charter remained in place, but the total number of obligations jumped from four to eleven; the clauses discussing these duties often referred to major postwar initiatives, including requirements that Communists "respect state secrets" and "preserve socialist property:' Most importantly, the charter expanded its language emphasizing the need for Communists to obey the party's will, to fight bureaucratic inertia, and to resist the temptations of office-holding. One provision urged Communists to fill positions in the bureaucracy "based on their political and practical qualities;' threatening to expel Communists who gave positions to their friends and cronies. Another declared that "There cannot be two disciplines in the party-one for leaders and another for the rank-andfile. The party has one discipline, one law for all Communists, regardless of their honors and the posts they occupy:' Still other provisions called for Communists to "fight against ostentatious well-being" among officials; to expose problems

The Communist Party and Its System ofInternal Discipline in the Postwar Years

29

with production by sending complaints to central party organs, "regardless of the person involved"; and to be an active fighter for the fulfillment of party decisions. For a member of the party, it is not enough just to agree with party decisions; a party member is obligated to fight to put these decisions in effect. The passive and formalistic attitude to party decisions on the part of Communists weakens the battle readiness of the party and is therefore incompatible with membership in its ranks. 65 The text of the 1952 charter, in short, hints at a critique that grew in intensity in subsequent years: that party organizations were becoming increasingly bureaucratic, passive, or even corrupt, and that the party discipline system had begun to treat office-holders and rank-and-file Communists in very different ways. The party's definition of its members' responsibilities entered a final stage with the 1961 party charter, which remained in effect unti11986. Whereas both the 1939 and 1952 charters had largely focused on a Communist's responsibilities in the workplace, the 1961 charter emphasized a broader vision of party activism. It began by modifying its definition of party membership to say that only a citizen "actively participating in the construction of communism'' could join the party-an important and high-profile example of Khrushchev's new focus on initiative and personal activism among Communists. Most strikingly, the charter instructed Communists to play a larger role in everyday life, requiring them • to participate actively in the political life of the country, in the administration of state affairs, and in economic and cultural production; to provide an example in the fulfillment of public duty, and to help strengthen Communist social relations; • to master Marxist-Leninist theory, to raise their ideological level, and to bring about the formation and upbringing of a person of communist society; to struggle decisively against all manifestations of bourgeois ideology, against the remnants of a private-property psychology, religious prejudices, and other vestiges of the past; to comply with the principles of Communist morality and put the public interests above the private. 66 Each of these clauses took an idea that had been part of the charter for years, but broadened its meaning, emphasizing that Communists must pursue a "public duty" that extended far beyond the workplace while helping to forge the New Soviet Person and maintaining the movement's moral principles. A later section of the 1961 charter went still further in requiring Communists to conduct themselves well in private, mandating that workplace-based primary party organizations "see to it that each Communist observe in his own life and cultivate among

30

Chapter One

workers the moral principles set forth in the CPSU program, the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism:' 67 The party's 1961 charter thus captured the essence of party membership under Khrushchev, emphasizing the importance of activism (rather than of mere discipline) and sharpening the regime's focus on Communist morality and the private behavior of party members. All of these themes were apparent when the Twenty-Second Congress announced the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism in October 1961. Strictly speaking, the new moral code applied to all "builders of Communism'' (and not merely to party members), but its place in the revised party program meant that it was-for all intents and purposes-the first code of conduct for Communists in party history. 68 The code took the form of twelve points, which represented the twelve moral principles that defined the ideal behavior of the New Soviet Person: 1. 2.

3. 4·

5· 6. 7· 8.

9. 10.

n. 12.

Dedication to the cause of Communism, love for the socialist motherland and for the countries of socialism Conscientious labor for the good of society; he who does not work does not eat The concern of all for the preservation and growth of the public domain High consciousness of public duty, intolerance toward violations of the public interest Collectivism and comradely mutual assistance; each for all, and all for one Humane relations and mutual respect between people; man is a friend, comrade, and brother to man Honesty and truthfulness, moral purity, simplicity, and modesty in public and private life Mutual respect in the family, care about the upbringing [vospitanie] of children Intolerance of injustice, parasitism, dishonesty, careerism, greed The friendship and brotherhood of all peoples of the USSR, intolerance of ethnic and racial hatred Intolerance toward the enemies of communism, peace, and the freedom of nations Fraternal solidarity with the workers of all countries, of all peoples 69

In many ways, this document functioned more as an abstract summary of regime values than as an effective, concrete ethical code; its principles were far too vague to provide real guidance to the "builders of Communism" about how they should conduct their lives. Fedor Burlatskii-one of the code's authors-has even written that it was composed hurriedly, after a night of heavy drinking, when the commission writing the new party program was suddenly told that Khrushchev wanted the party program to include a moral code and needed its text quickly/a

The Communist Party and Its System ofInternal Discipline in the Postwar Years

31

Nevertheless, as vague as the Moral Code was, it illustrated the party's growing concern with personal behavior and highlighted a theme that was crucial to the vision of good behavior promoted by the Khrushchev-era party: the intolerance of misconduct. In fact, the word "intolerance" (neterpimost' or neprimirimost) is repeated four times in the code, and even the phrase "he who does not work does not eat" is repeated in a distinctly judgmental way, to stigmatize those accused of parasitism.?• The code championed a viewpoint that was also prominently featured in the propaganda of the time-that a builder of Communism needed to actively challenge any "antisocial act" or "vestige of capitalism'' he or she witnessed in public. "It is not uncommon to observe cases where tens of people see the roistering of a drunken hooligan, but cowardly avoid him, not wanting to interfere, trying to stay out of trouble;' complained one party pamphlet explaining the Moral Code. "Many of them try to explain their failure to interfere with violations of the public interest, by saying that only the organs of the state are obligated to struggle with antisocial acts:' 72 Khrushchev's Communist Party sought to challenge that idea head on, urging all "builders of Communism'' not only to conduct themselves well in private, but to use the full weight of "public opinion" (obshchestvennoe mnenie) to challenge the bad behavior of others. Ultimately, the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism highlighted some of the same tensions and contradictions that defined Frol Kozlov's article on the CPSU as "the party of the whole people:' The Moral Code was simultaneously triumphant in its rhetoric and toothless in its approach to misconduct by Communists: although primary party organizations were instructed to make sure their members observed the code's strictures, the party's rate of expulsion remained near its all-time low even after the code's passage. Communists, in short, were urged to show intolerance toward "antisocial acts" by others but were not always judged harshly for their misconduct in the home. The fact that the code applied to all "builders of communism'' -and not just to Communists-also drove home the growing prominence of other voluntary public organizations relative to the party. The passage of the Moral Code was arguably the high point of Khrushchev's campaign to mobilize the Soviet public against "vestiges of capitalism" like drunkenness and hooliganism, but party organizations were often ill-suited to play a role in that campaign as prominent as that of newly reinvigorated institutions like the comrades' court and the druzhina/ 3 (These institutions were often at the center of Khrushchev's campaign to combat "antisocial acts" and "vestiges of the past" by rallying obshchestvennost'-or "the public:') Ironically, the Moral Code for the Builder of Communism drew attention both to the regime's new focus on citizens' personal behavior and to the fact that it was increasingly difficult to use the party as a tool for fighting improper conduct. The regime's efforts to mobilize "builders of Communism'' against the "vestiges of capitalism" also underscored a theme that will recur frequently in this book-that the party's new efforts to achieve public "persuasion" were often highly coercive themselves, albeit in new and different ways/4

32

Chapter One

To be sure, it would be a mistake to overemphasize changes in how party documents discussed the behavior of Communists: as insightful as the Moral Code and the party charter can be in highlighting the party's evolving notion of the ideal Communist, they were surprisingly incomplete as a guide to the public role and proper behavior of party members. For one thing, although the 1961 party charter closely mirrored the rhetoric of the Khrushchev years, much of its content could plausibly have been included in any past iteration of the charter. Moreover, although the party did not pass an official code of conduct for its members until1961, party sources of the 1920s and 1930s agreed that Communists should be purged from the party when they committed misconduct that was not mentioned in the charter's list of duties and obligations;75 until1939, for example, later sections of the charter referred to the need to purge "the morally dissolute;' denouncing those who had "lowered the dignity of the party with their unseemly conduct:'76 The party charters operating during the postwar years therefore have an ad hoc, almost slapdash feel, ignoring principles that were widely accepted in public discussions of how the party should work.7 7 Other sources give a broader sense of how the party envisioned its members' behavior. "Although the party does not specify demands to its members on how they should construct their personal life in any of its party documents;' the theoretician Emelian Iaroslavskii wrote in his 1935 pamphlet What the Party Demands of a Communist, "it stands to reason that a Communist in his everyday life should be an example to all the nonparty masses:'78 Religion, for example, was not a "private, personal matter"; instead, Communists were expected not only to be atheists, but "to actively participate in anti-religious propaganda:'79 When it came to their home life, Iaroslavskii made it clear that Communists were generally free to choose who they married, to raise their children as they chose, and to spend their pay as they saw fit-provided, say, that they did not marry class enemies, beat their wives, or ban their children from the Pioneers. so "The party does not establish rules and norms of behavior for every member in every instance of his life;' Iaroslavskii wrote, before adding "But this does not mean that the party does not care about the behavior of a Communist if he is not at a party assembly or at work in an institution or enterprise:'s• Iaroslavskii thus emphasizes the expansiveness of the party's view of ethics while mostly ignoring important questions addressed by the Moral Code (like a Communist's family life). Iaroslavskii's pamphlet also championed an instrumentalist vision of the party's attitude toward its members' behavior that is often hinted at in official party documents, arguing both that Communists should defend the party's reputation and that they should work more broadly in the interests of socialism. 5 Many of his examples illustrate the first of these themes. "Never forget that the non-party masses watch your behavior;' he emphasized at one point. "They draw conclusions about Communists from your actions:' 83 If a Communist drank too much, for example, he would "repel honorable workers and peasants from the party. 2

The Communist Party and Its System of Internal Discipline in the Postwar Years

33

These honorable workers and peasants will not say 'Ivanov drinks heavily'; they will say 'the Communist Ivanov drinks heavily, Communists drink heavily:" 84 But Iaroslavskii also championed a broader point about the need for Communists to support the revolution in every way, advising his readers: Act in such a way, that every step in both your public life and your private, family life will help the destruction of the old exploitative society and will help unite all laborers around the proletariat, creating a new society, the society of Communists. Act so that each of your steps will promote the success of communism, attracting to communism new masses. Cast off everything that contradicts this and that interferes with this goal, and overcome it as a barrier on the path to communism. That is what the party can demand of each Communist.85 This rule applied to private behavior-a drunken Communist was likely to miss work and weaken labor discipline-but was also part oflaroslavskii's general advice on the nature of party membership. laroslavskii strongly endorsed the charter's vision of a Communist's "avant-garde, advanced, leading role;' declaring that "wherever a Communist works-in a factory, on a kolkhoz, on a sovkhoz, in the army or the navy, in a Soviet institution, in a cooperative, in trade, in transportation, and at school-a Communist is obligated to show good examples of labor:'86 Iaroslavskii even expanded on the charter's view that a Communist needed to know the party charter and program, adding that general literacy was as important as political literacy and that Communists should read newspapers and magazines, so they could explain current events to their friends and coworkers. ''A Communist who does not know current events, and who does not know the decisions of the party, is not a Communist;' he concluded. 87 In the postwar years, then, official sources showed a clear progression in their discussion of the behavioral norms associated with party membership: these rules became more explicit and direct, especially when it came to a Communist's duty to be an example to other citizens outside the confines of the workplace and the party meeting, but they always emphasized the high standards governing the conduct of party members.

The Hierarchy of Party Punishments

The party discipline system entered the picture when Communists failed to live up to their obligations to the party. Even before the Bolsheviks took power in the October Revolution, the party charter had provisions on the punishment of members who committed misconduct. The Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party charter included a clause on the expulsion of members beginning in 1903, and the Russian Communist Party added language dealing with

34

Chapter One

censure soon after the revolution, in 1919; in the party's early days, expulsion and censure were conceived as ways to deal with "failures to implement the decisions of higher organs and other misdemeanors acknowledged as criminal by public opinion in the partY:'88 In the 1920s, as both the requirements and the benefits of party membership increased and as concerns with factionalism and the opposition rose, expulsion became an increasingly important practice, most often carried out through a mass purge (chistka). This process involved the systematic verification of the credentials of every Communist and was typically carried out by independent purge commissions (rather than directly by local party organs). Purges were generally run in an orderly manner and were intended to remove careerist and passive Communists from the party, to ensure the party's essentially proletarian nature, and to eliminate opposition factions. 89 At times, however, the mass purge became chaotic and violent, especially during the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. Either way, purges typically reshaped the party, resulting in the expulsion of at least 10 percent of Communists in a matter of months. The process of party discipline underwent dramatic changes beginning in 1939, becoming more regular, less frequent, and less closely linked to questions of the party's purity. The mass purge generally did not survive as an institution beyond the 1939 party congress; the main exceptions to this rule were several localized purges of the late 1940s (following the so-called Leningrad, Estonian, and Mingrelian affairs) 90 and the postwar purge of Communists who had lived on Nazi-occupied territory (the subject of chapter 2). In nearly all instances thereafter, "the examination of personal cases" (razbor personal'nykh del) was therefore an everyday task for party organizations, beginning with a Communist's peers in his or her primary party organization (PPO) and proceeding to the highest political body in the region, the provincial party committee (or obkom). Unless they dealt with the case of an influential official, party investigations depended on the work of the rank -and-file and were not primarily conducted by the local powers-that-be, which meant party discipline became part of the education (vospitanie) of the whole party organization. Participating in the party's internal disciplinary system, in short, was a basic part of the Communist experience. The disciplinary process was laid out in the charter's first section, after its discussion of the rights and responsibilities of Communists. The 1939 version of the charter cut straight to the point: "The question of expelling someone from the party is decided by the general assembly of the primary party organization;' it noted, without discussing what sort of wrongdoing might lead to expulsion. 9 ' Later versions of the charter added a brief introduction to their discussion of misconduct: For the failure to fulfill his duties under the charter and other offenses, a member or candidate for membership in the party can be brought to responsibility

The Communist Party and Its System ofInternal Discipline in the Postwar Years

35

and a punishment can be imposed on him: a putting on notice [postanovka na vid], a reprimand (or strict reprimand), or a reprimand (or strict reprimand) with a notation on the registration card. The highest measure of party punishment is expulsion from the party. 9 • All versions of the charter went on to note that minor varieties of misconduct should be given a less severe punishment. "For petty offenses (absence from a meeting, failure to pay members' dues on time, and so on), measures of party education [vospitanie] and influence [vozdeistvie] provided for by the charter should be applied, and not expulsion from the party, which is the highest measure of party punishment;' the 1939 charter noted; the 1961 charter added that full members could be transferred to candidate status and specified that "insignificant offenses" should be confronted with "comradely criticism;' a "warning;' or an "instruction" (ukazanie). 93 These guidelines gave local party organizations a wide degree oflatitude, but in practice, the list of party punishments remained unchanged throughout the postwar era. Well before the system of reprimands was made explicit in the 1952 charter, party organs had settled on a uniform thirteen-part series of punishments, which is summarized in table 3. These punishments began with a warning and ended with expulsion, featuring several types of reprimand (vygovor) in between. Deviations from this system were rare and might include the issuing of a "strict reprimand with a final warning" or a "reprimand with a notation in the personal file:' 94 Nevertheless, given the trivial differences between many of these punishments, the party's system of penalties can be best understood not as a thirteen-grade scale of increasing severity, but as a grouping of four types of punishment. First carne the minor sanctions, or admonitions, which amounted to a slap on the wrist: the warning, the instruction, and the decision to put a Communist on notice (postanovka na vid). These punishments had no lasting consequences, did not require the approval of the party's regional or city committee, and did not appear on a Communist's permanent record. They were most often used to admonish economic administrators whose workplace did not meet the expectations of the regime, and sometimes resulted when a higher party organ voted to soften the punishment of a Communist who had been reprimanded by a lower body. In many instances, they were part of both the party's regular role of overseeing the workplace and efforts to push managers to do a more effective job. The second category of punishment was composed of reprimands, which could be made more severe if designated as "strict" or associated with a warning or notation. 95 Although statistics on this punishment are sparse, the reprimand was clearly the most common form of party discipline, outnumbering expulsions by a margin of at least two or three to one. A 1952 KPK survey of thirty-two party organizations with 2-4 million members found that 254,897 Communists (10.4 percent) had a reprimand on their record; the percentage was "very significant"

36

Chapter One

TABLE 3 -Penalties within the Party Discipline System (In Ascending Order of Severity)

Warning [preduprezhdenie 1 2

Instruction [ukazanie1

3

Putting on notice [postanovka na vid1

4

Reprimand [vygovor1

s Strict reprimand [strogii vygovor1 6

Reprimand with a warning [vygovor s preduprezhdeniem 1

7

Reprimand with a notation on the registration card [vygovor s zaneseniem v uchetnuyu kartochku 1

8

Reprimand with a warning and a notation on the registration card [vygovor s preduprezhdeniem is zaneseniem v uchetnuyu kartochku 1

9

Strict reprimand with a warning [strogii vygovor s preduprezhdeniem1

10

Strict reprimand with a notation on the registration card [strogii vygovor s zaneseniem v uchetnuyu kartochku1

11

Strict reprimand with a warning and a notation on the registration card [strogii vygovor s preduprezhdeniem i s zaneseniem v uchetnuyu kartochku 1

12

Demotion to candidacy

13

Expulsion [iskliuchenie1

Spravochnik "KPSS v tsifrakh" na 1 ianvaria 1962 g (RGANl f. 77, o. 1, d. 26,1. 21) and "KPSS v tsifrakh 1961-1964 gody);' Partiinaia zhizn', May 1965,8-17.

in some party organizations, reaching 30.4 percent in one district ofSverdlovsk Province. 96 Similarly, a 1950 KPK report from Moldavia found that n percent of the republic's Communists had been given some sort of censure. 97 The reprimand, unsurprisingly, was given to Communists whose conduct was worthy of condemnation but was not serious enough to merit expulsion. Reprimands were meant to be temporary and to teach the accused a lesson. As a handbook for PPO secretaries explained, "If a Communist proves in practice that he has reformed and deeply feels his guilt before the party for the act he committed, then that party organization should remove [sniat1 the punishment from this member or candidate:'98 Many sources went further, arguing that it was the duty of a censured Communist to improve his conduct and get the reprimand lifted. When the party committee of Saratov's GPZ-3 ball-bearing factory heard the case of a man who had misplaced his party card and lost

The Communist Party and Its System ofInternal Discipline in the Postwar Years

37

hundreds of the factory's rubles, for example, it asked him several pointed questions: "How are you going to vindicate yourself? And how will you work to lift your reprimand?" 99 Many Communists accused of wrongdoing who had been censured in the past were quizzed on why they had not tried harder to have their reprimands removed from their record. The use of party discipline as a tool in the education of Communists was also evident in the third (and rarest) variety of punishment: the demotion of a full party member to candidate status. Demotion to candidacy was a more humiliating penalty than censure, and was used to spur Communists to reform themselves. When the KPK considered the 1955 appeal of a man expelled for drunkenness who claimed to have reformed, its chairman announced the committee's decision to demote him to candidacy to "verify that you keep your word. If you work well and behave correctly, we will accept you as a member, and if you violate party discipline, we will expel you as a candidate:'lOo The use of demotion proved controversial in the party, appearing and disappearing from the party charter until it was finally abolished in 1966.101 If a Communist's misconduct was too severe for any of these penalties, he or she faced "the highest measure of party punishment" -expulsion. Unlike other punishments, exclusion from the party was meant to be permanent: 102 an expelled Communist could only win reinstatement via an appeal or a petition from his PPO, and his expulsion would remain as a black mark on his record for the rest of his career. (Many employment questionnaires asked citizens to mention their past tenure in the party, for instance, drawing attention to expulsion cases.) The party charter also allowed for a variant on expulsion, "mechanical" or "automatic" exclusion from the party. In principle, it was impossible for Communists to leave the party of their own free will; they could only become a non-Communist if the party expelled them or declared that they had "mechanically left" its ranks (mekhanicheski vybyl). In most instances, Communists were mechanically excluded when they repeatedly failed to pay their dues or attend meetings!03 Communists who had "mechanically left" the party did not face the stigma confronting other ex-Communists: they were free to rejoin it later on, although party members might ask them why they had not been more devoted party members the first time. In all, the party expelled 1,735,045 Communists from its ranks between 1945 and 1964 {including mechanical exclusions)!04 During the mid-to-late 1940s, the party expelled more than one hundred thousand members each year on various misconduct charges, a figure that declined in the early 1950s and plummeted under Khrushchev, reaching an annual total of roughly thirty to forty thousand in the late 1950s. These statistics are impressive in raw terms, but low in relation to the size of the party. Even the 190,037 party members expelled in 1948 represented less than 3 percent of all Communists, far less than the 21 percent expelled in the 1921 purge. 105 Still, expulsion was a frequent occurrence familiar to the members of most party organizations, and censure was even more common. Although

38

Chapter One

TABLE 4 -Expulsions from the Communist Party YEAR

by Year,

1945-1964

TOTAL

MECHANICAL

ALL

PERCENTAGE OF

EXPELLED FOR

AND AUTOMATIC

EXPULSIONS

TOTAL PARTY

MISCONDUCT

EXCLUSIONS

MEMBERSHIP

1945

100,259

2,866

103,125

1.79%

1946

103,245

4,162

107,407

1.94%

1947

123,461

9,105

132,566

2.19%

1948

167,890

22,147

190,037

2.97%

1949

140,278

22,086

162,364

2.56%

1950

114,798

14,175

128,973

2.03%

1951

85,611

13,313

98,924

1.53%

1952

94,583

17,356

111,939

1.65%

1953

134,293

41,281

175,574

2.55%

1954

82,362

43,668

126,030

1.84%

1955

38,540

5,835

44,375

0.64%

1956

35,058

7,181

42,239

0.59%

1957

36,222

9,437

45,659

0.61%

1958

42,397

10,905

53,303

0.67%

1959

42,969

10,487

53,456

0.64%

1960

31,045

9,288

40,444

0.46%

1961

28,559

9,988

38,547

0.42%

1962

31,370

13,614

44,984

0.45%

1963

34,045

35,409

69,454

0.67%

1964

30,763

38,077

68,770

0.62%

RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 26, I. 25.

central sources do not track the number of party reprimands, they appear to have outnumbered expulsion cases by a margin of two or three to one. By the postwar era, the consequences of expulsion were far milder than they had been in the 1930s: expulsion from the party rarely led to execution, exile to the Gulag, or a prison sentence, for example. Nevertheless, expulsion and censure were significant sanctions that could have a major impact on Communists' lives and careers. Many party sources quoted Stalin's famous statement

The Communist Party and Its System ofInternal Discipline in the Postwar Years

39

that "membership in the party or exclusion from the party is a great turning point in a person's life";' 06 the Russian emigre Yuri Glazov echoed these words when he described expulsion as "a turning point in life" and "a real tragedy for almost everybodY:'107 Given recent changes in the party's composition, expulsion amounted to exclusion from the country's political and administrative elite, and even a censure could badly hurt a Communist's career. Though its effects were often intangible, the party discipline process threatened the reputation of accused Communists, denied them access to connections and political networks, and humiliated them in front of friends and colleagues. The consequences of party discipline cases could vary greatly depending on the rank of the accused: the higher an accused Communist's position, the more likely he or she was to find expulsion a devastating experience. (Then again, as will be discussed below, higher-ranking officials were often treated very differently from the rank-and-file in party discipline cases.) Party membership was a prerequisite for any citizen who harbored political aspirations, and its clearest benefits resulted from the prestige it conferred and the connections it offered to ambitious young workers. An expulsion could therefore strike the career of an official or administrator dead in its tracks. (In December 1946, for example, the former boss of a workshop PPO at Molotov's Stalin Factory spoke for many when he begged to remain in the party: "I am ready to accept any punishment, but not political death;' he said.)'08 By contrast, although expulsion threatened the career prospects of young Communists, it did not necessarily jeopardize their immediate job security. Some Communists were fired from their jobs when they were expelled, especially in cases involving policemen and party or government workers (even accountants or low-level staffers), but a surprising number of kolkhoz chairmen managed to hold on to their positions even when they were expelled from the party for incompetence and corruption. The impact of expulsion often depended on the aspirations of the accused Communist. Consider the case of an engineer, for instance. If he was content to keep plying his trade in a factory, then expulsion would probably make little or no difference to his career: his pay would remain the same, his technical expertise would allow him to keep his job or find similar work, and his life would continue largely as before. The real impact of expulsion would come if the engineer sought advancement-if he wanted to be his factory's chief engineer, a workplace boss, or a factory director. Harvard Project respondents agreed that non-Communists would eventually reach a point where they could not rise any higher unless they joined the party: When asked what would happen if someone refused to become a Communist, one interviewee replied, "Well, then, his career would freeze:'•o9 The most dramatic consequence of the party discipline system, however, was the public humiliation of the accused. Misconduct hearings in the workplace were intended to bring Communists' misconduct to the attention of those who knew them best (and could thus judge them the best), and rumors of what

40

Chapter One

happened behind closed doors spread quickly to workers outside the party. Moreover, the party discipline process could be a punishing experience in and of itself. A Communist had to face the questioning of other party members on several different occasions-as few as two (in some censure cases) or as many as nine (in the case of a woman considered in chapters). The party discipline process could drag on for months or even years, providing frequent face-to-face encounters between Communists and their accusers and spreading word of the offender's misconduct to his or her friends and acquaintances. Feelings of humiliation could take many forms. Speakers at misconduct hearings typically addressed the accused using the formal second-person form vy, but they sometimes chose to emphasize their displeasure by using the informal tytreating the Communist like a child, not a member of the political elite. 110 Other Communists recalled the pain of being addressed "like a schoolchild" or the discomfort they felt when their former colleagues quit greeting them with the title "comrade:'m Some party officials-most often district or provincial committee secretaries who defined their identity around their party status-were so devastated by their expulsion that they committed suicide. 112 One Harvard Project respondent even made the hyperbolic claim that he would prefer a six-month prison sentence to a party reprimand. "Six months of prison, well, it is forgotten afterwards;' he said. "But a Party [reprimand] is written into your membership book of the Party. And this will hang over your head all your life. It may come up when you ask for promotion, or anywhere else:'113 It is hardly surprising, then, that many former Communists told the party about the feelings of shame that resulted from their expulsion. In a 1946 case, the obkom in Molotov considered the appeal of a former raikom chairman who had been expelled after the harvest failed. He wrote that he felt "tortured every day" by his expulsion and concluded, "I cannot accept the thought that I am outside the ranks of the party:'114 In a December 1960 appeal to the KPK, another Communist wrote that "every day" had been marked by "torture, shame, and disgrace" since his expulsion for speculation seven years before. 115 A woman from Novosibirsk traveled all the way to Moscow to argue her case before the KPK: "After my exclusion from the party I fell into an unforgivable depression, and I endured a lot in that time;' she said. 116 These were all self-interested stories, of course-lamenting the pain of exclusion was a good way to win reinstatementbut the disciplinary process was sufficiently long, personal, and unpleasant to make many of these claims plausible. After all, one of the main benefits of party membership was being part of a larger Soviet project, the process of building socialism in the USSR. As one political scientist has noted, "Communists may take considerable pride in belonging to the country's political elite, to the decision-makers, to the soldiers of the revolution, to a secular order which is reshaping the world in sovereign fashion:' 117 Although some Communists were cynical careerists, others believed in their country's system of government and wanted to be a part of it; to them,

The Communist Party and Its System ofInternal Discipline in the Postwar Years

41

expulsion would evoke feelings of personal rejection and shame, exactly as the Soviet leadership intended. In fact, every year a handful of Communists wrote to the KPK to change the official date when they joined the party to an earlier year, often so they could say that they joined the party before 1917."8 Such a ruling did not confer any concrete benefits, but showed the pride many Communists felt in the party. Party membership, then, had its share of tangible and intangible benefits, and expulsion took those benefits away.

The Road to Expulsion and Censure

The party discipline process began in the workplace and ended at the center of political power in Moscow, taking on many different forms along the way. Over the course of an investigation, accused Communists faced the judgment of their peers, their supervisors at work, and the members of their district party committee; no expulsion could be finalized without the approval of the obkom, which was composed of the party's provincial leadership. They were meant to answer one crucial question: Did the accused party member live up to "the high title of a Communist" in his or her actions, both in the specific context of the case and in the broader context of his or her life? Party discipline, in short, was not a narrow matter of guilt and innocence, but a larger inquiry into a Communist's character and personality that was meant to shape the attitudes and behavior of the local party membership as a whole. In most cases, the disciplinary process began in a member's PPO, which was typically the party cell of a workplace. Disciplinary cases could arise in several different ways-with a denunciation, notice of a prosecution in court, or the PPO's everyday supervisory work-but one fact remained constant: a rank-and-file Communist's conduct would be judged by his or her peers and coworkers before higher-ranking officials had their say. Party writings emphasize the importance of the disciplinary process both to individual Communists and to the PPO as a whole. The party required the "personal participation'' of an accused Communist in the hearing, partly to ensure the "careful consideration'' of the accusation and partly to guarantee that the proceedings exerted an "educational influence" (vospitatel'noe vozdeistvie) on him."9 In stark contrast to Western criminal trials, party discipline hearings were meant to take advantage of Communists' knowledge of their comrades; moreover, the hearing was intended not only to decide the fate of the accused, but to teach onlookers a lesson. As the KPK's deputy chairman noted in a 1957 journal article, The primary organization truly knows the Communist, his worthiness and his shortcomings. It is able to correctly and objectively evaluate what he does for the party. The productive work and service of a Communist, as well as his public [obshchestvennaia] work, take place before the eyes of the party

42

Chapter One

organization. Even his personal life is known to his comrades. If not them, then who is to judge the accusation, and how can someone better act on this Communist? And, finally, the discussion of the behavior of various Communists at the party assembly plays a large educational role for all the Communists in the given party organization. 120 Party rules therefore required that misconduct hearings be held at regular PPO meetings; a Communist could only be expelled by a majority vote of his PPO (or, after 1961, a two-thirds vote). 12' Essentially no hearings ended with the accused Communist walking away unpunished. The PPO was only the first of many party organs to vote on a Communist's fate. In a large workplace, such as a major factory, a Communist could face three hearings-at the bureau of his PPO, at the PPO's general assembly, and at the bureau of a larger workplace committee; when these organs had completed their work, they were expected to send a copy of the resolution, a protocol of the hearing, and a written explanatory statement (ob"iasnenie) by the accused to the party organ that supervised them.' 22 Next, a case proceeded to a city committee (gorkom), a district committee (raikom), or both-depending on the size of the locale. At this stage, members of the local party leadership reviewed the case, often sending staff members to the PPO for an investigation, and called the accused to a session of the committee's bureau for judgment. There was, however, one exception to this model of party discipline. Although the vast majority of Communists accused of misconduct were investigated and judged by their primary party organization, a 1952 amendment to the party charter announced that the members of relatively high-ranking party organsbeginning with a raikom or gorkom-were to be judged first by the members of the committee they served on (with no investigation by the party cell). 123 This change was part of a trend analyzed by Cynthia Hooper, whose work discusses the shielding of a growing number of state and party officials from denunciations and misconduct investigations. 124 Local administrators such as factory directors were sometimes exposed to the scathing attacks of their subordinates at party misconduct hearings, but party procedures were far more concerned with ensuring that rank-and-file Communists were judged by both their peers and their superiors than they were with mandating that powerful figures face the criticism of their subordinates. Wherever they originated, cases in which a Communist was reprimanded ended at the district or city level, but expulsion cases had to be approved by the obkom, or provincial committee, before they could go into effect. (Under every party charter beginning in 1939, a Communist had the right to keep his or her membership card and attend party meetings until the obkom had endorsed the expulsion.) 125 Since the obkom was the party's chief policy-making body in a province and heard hundreds of cases each year, it first referred the record of each accused Communist to a body known as the party collegium, which

The Communist Party and Its System ofInternal Discipline in the Postwar Years

43

TABLE 5 -An Outline of the Party Discipline Process STEP IN

SuB-STEPS AND PARTY

EXPLANATION OF

THE PROCESS

ORGANS INVOLVED

SUB-STEPS

Step I: The Primary Party Organization (or PPO)

Step Ia (where applicable) : the PPO bureau

Small PPOs only had an assembly; larger ones also had a bureau, which had to approve each censure or expulsion

Step lb: the PPO general assembly (sobranie)

OTHER NOTES

The process began when a majority of PPO members voted for a censure or expulsion (after 1961, expulsion required a two-thirds vote)

Step 2 (where applicable): The Intermediate Party Committee

Step 2: Usually a factory committee, occasionally with both an assembly and a bureau

Especially large workplaces were composed of multiple PPOs overseen by a factory party committee, which approved punishments chosen by aPPO

Step 3: The District and/or City Committee

Step 3a: Raikom (district committee) or gorkom (city committee)

In most cases, the next step was a raikom (in rural areas) or a gorkom (in urban areas). Many major cities or provincial centers were subdivided into districts, in which case a Communist had to pass through both step 3a and step 3b.

Cases involving a reprimand ended when a raikom and/or gorkom approved the punishmen! selected by a PPO. For an expulsion, the district and city committees were only intermediate steps. Reprimanded Communists were free to appeal to higher party organs, however.

Before the obkom heard a case, its party collegium reviewed the facts, held a hearing, and made a recommendation for the full committee.

If the obkom voted for expulsion, it became officia! and the Communist handed in his party card, unless the region had a higher-ranking territorial committee.

Step 3b (where applicable): The gorkom (city committee)

Step 4: The Provincial Committee

Step 4a: The obkom party collegium Step 4b: The obkom bureau

The obkom bureau was the body whose vote made an expulsion final. Step 5 (where applicable): Territorial or Republican Party Organs

Step Sa: The kraikom or okruzhkom (territorial party organ) Step Sb: The republican Central Committee

Step 6: Appealing to Moscow

RGANJ f. 77, o. !, d. 26, I. 61.

Step 6: The KPK (the Commission or Committee of Party Control)

Oversaw the work of the obkom in a handful of sparsely populated regions of the Russian republic. Oversaw the work of the obkom in all republics but Russia. Known as the Commission of Party Control until!953 and the Committee of Party Control afterward, the KPK was the party's de facto court of last appeal.

Any expelled or censured Communist could appeal to the KPK, either going to Moscow to make his or her case or appealing by correspondence (zaochno ). The KPK could hear multiple appeals and refer a case back to lower organs.

44

Chapter One

investigated the case and then invited the expelled party member to a hearing; the collegium then sent a recommendation to the obkom bureau for approval (and a final hearing). The vote of the provincial party committee was final, and any Communist whose expulsion it endorsed was required to hand in his or her membership card immediately. This system was not the most efficient. For one thing, each level of the party was more likely to rescind an expulsion than to expel a Communist who had originally been censured; city and district party committees overturned around 20 percent of all the expulsions they were asked to confirm, and obkoms threw out 15 to 30 percent of the expulsions they reviewed. 126 In other words, the members of a party cell were consistently more likely to expel one of their comrades than were the higher-ranking officials who considered the same case-a striking conclusion, suggesting that many rank-and-file Communists were serious about their disciplinary work and intolerant of perceived misconduct. Obkom officials explained the differing approaches of PPOs and higher organs by pointing to the low quality of local investigations, while raikom officials charged that provincial leaders were too lenient.127 Nevertheless, party sources still insisted on the PPO's involvement in most misconduct cases, presumably so that the case would have an "educational" effect on other Communists. Party leaders also required that workers for the raikom and party collegium duplicate each other's investigative work, an inefficiency that was finally eliminated when a 1966 amendment to the charter allowed for an expulsion to go into effect with the vote of a raikom. 128 A vote of the obkom did not necessarily end the party discipline process, however: an expelled Communist could still regain his or her party membership via an appeal or a petition.'29 A majority of the Communists who chose to fight their expulsion did so via the first method, by sending an appeal to the Commission of Party Control (or KPK), which was renamed the Committee of Party Control in 1952.'3° Former Communists could appeal for reinstatement either in person or by correspondence. A KPK staff member reviewed each appeal and sent a report to the full committee, which discussed the case, interviewed the expelled Communist (when possible), and announced its decision. Between 1945 and 1953, the number of annual appeals to the KPK was equal to roughly 5 to 10 percent of the number of expulsions, and between 10 and 15 percent of appeals were successful; after 1953, both the frequency of appeals and their success rate rose, with the KPK hearing appeals comparable in number to about 13 percent of expelled Communists in 1961 and overturning 21.97 percent of expulsions.'3' Expelled Communists could keep appealing to the KPK as many times as they wished, even when the KPK had brushed their previous appeals aside. Although most ex-Communists who sought restoration to the party did so via an appeal, others followed a potentially simpler route: the petition (khodataistvo ), a formal request by a party organization for the restoration of one of its members (or for the removal of a reprimand from his or her record). Some

The Communist Party and Its System ofInternal Discipline in the Postwar Years

45

ex-Communists were told upon their expulsion that they could rejoin the party with a petition, while others decided on their own to pursue this approach; if the PPO voted to endorse the petition, it would be sent up the party hierarchy. A negative vote by any party organ would end the process. Whether its goal was reinstatement in the party or the removal of a reprimand, petitions exemplified the use of the disciplinary process as a means of vospitanie. Party organs were most likely to suggest that a member petition for restoration if he or she had been expelled for a personal failing that could be corrected, such as a poor work record, drunkenness, or family problems; in some cases, a Communist was told that he could petition for reinstatement if he "prove[d], through exemplary work, that he ha[d] corrected his mistakes:''32 The process of petitioning was nearly identical for censured Communists, who could usually convince a raikom to remove any reprimands from their record with a petition from their PPO. Party organs also heard petitions from Communists who had previously been expelled from the party and then restored to its ranks, since many restored Communists were either given a censure or regained their party membership with a gap in their party record; a petition could remove either the reprimand or the gap in a Communist's party tenure. The process of petition and appeal could therefore go on almost indefinitely. Accused Communists at every stage of the process used a wide variety of defense strategies to avoid expulsion or a severe reprimand. Some pleaded innocence, denying that they had done anything wrong or calling the motives of their accusers into question; others described the mitigating circumstances that surrounded their actions. The first of these strategies was usually unsuccessful. In the most common variation of this approach, an accused party member claimed that the authorities were biased against him, usually because he had accused them ofwrongdoing. 133 In June 1946, for example, the KPK heard the appeal of Comrade 0, a Communist from Kostroma Province who was accused of getting drunk with several local officials when he was supposed to be helping with the harvest. "I believe that I was punished not because I did poor work, but because I made critical remarks on work-related questions about violators of the law in the leadership of our district;' he said.'34 Other Communists sought to prove their innocence more narrowly, like a Gulag administrator who admitted that prisoners he oversaw had been beaten but denied any personal involvement.'35 This strategy often backfired. The members of the Kishertskii raikom in Molotov Province reacted angrily when a former judge denied that he had hidden his social origins, for example. Comrade T "did not sincerely confess, but tries to prove his innocence, when all this is proven on paper [dokumental'no];' one bureau member announced.'36 Communists who denied the charges against them were likely to be criticized for "insincerity" (neiskrennost), increasing the likelihood of a severe punishment. Other Communists pointed out the extenuating circumstances that surrounded their actions. This approach could be extremely unconvincing: a

46

Chapter One

surprisingly large number of men accused of getting married in church claimed that they had only done so while intoxicated and therefore deserved to remain in the party, for instance.'37 Other Communists pleaded that they were forced to commit wrongdoing by "difficult material conditions" or by family problems. A former PPO secretary from Molotov claimed to have embezzled party dues only to support his family of five after his wife and daughter contracted tuberculosis,'38 while the obkom in Kalinin overturned the expulsion of a man who had lost his party card three times when it learned that his son had recently died.'39 Some accusations lent themselves to particular lines of defense. Communists accused of the loss of a party card frequently claimed that the card had disappeared on a crowded streetcar (since they could hardly deny having lost it).' 40 Practically every Communist accused of baptizing his children claimed to have been out of town at the time of the christening, declaring that his wife or another female relative had brought his child to a priest without his knowledge.'4' The list of excuses for alleged misconduct could go on indefinitely: POWs argued that their capture was the result of battlefield wounds, while officials accused of embezzlement claimed to be guilty of poor record-keeping. Some of these claims were undoubtedly true, but more often than not, an argument that was widely repeated in party discipline cases was unlikely to head off a Communist's expulsion. In fact, only one excuse was likely to let a Communist off the hook: that he was young, had an otherwise impeccable record, and did not know that his conduct was wrong. When a kolkhoznik from Kalinin Province was accused of losing his membership card, for instance, he explained, "I am still a young Communist, and I did not know that I needed to preserve my party card so seriously and carefully. Now I have come to realize this seriousness, and I hope that I will preserve my party document so that I will never lose it:'' 4' Likewise, when the party committee of Saratov's GPZ-3 Factory heard the case of a man who failed to pay his dues, it limited his punishment to a strict reprimand and gave him three days to pay his debt. "Comrade A is really still a young Communist, he's not a lost person, and he has come to understand his mistake;' one committee member observed.'43 For this strategy to succeed, however, a Communist had to show that he was ignorant enough to be innocent of conscious misconduct but knowledgeable enough to be a worthy Communist-a difficult balance to maintain! A Communist's best line of defense, then, was to focus on the strength of his record and his determination to reform. Communists with no previous reprimands were sure to remind party organs that they had a clean record, while a Communist with a reprimand was often criticized because he "did not draw the necessary conclusions" from his punishment. More broadly, party organs frequently discussed the work habits, references (kharakteristiki), and war service of the accused. In many cases, party organs even passed resolutions declaring that a Communist "deserved" expulsion from the party, but was being reprimanded instead because of favorable testimonials from his bosses or

1he Communist Party and Its System ofInternal Discipline in the Postwar Years

47

because of his record in the war. In other words, many Communists succeeded in avoiding expulsion or in receiving a milder-than-expected reprimand by emphasizing their service to the regime. They often did so by pointing to their World War II service: to convince the party, they typically had to show that they were injured fighting the Nazis or had won medals for front-line service, and even then, many decorated veterans were expelled from the party's ranks.' 44 Other accused party members sought to prove their worthiness by highlighting their productive labor record. A poor workplace record increased the odds of a Communist's expulsion even in cases unrelated to work, prompting comments like "he has not vindicated himself in production as a specialist and a leader";'45 many Communists emphasized their productivity on the job as a reason to keep them in the party. A final group of Communists focused on their dedication to the Communist Party and their activism within its ranks, but as seen below, they could also get into trouble when it turned out that they had failed to fulfill their basic duties as Communists. One final factor often proved decisive in misconduct cases: was the accused Communist willing to admit that he or she had made a mistake? It was extremely rare for a Communist accused of a serious offense to avoid expulsion without at least making a gesture toward confession; an unrepentant Communist might escape unscathed if he could provide an iron-dad case for his innocence, or if his coworkers were willing to stretch the definition of a "confession'' to help out a friend, but otherwise, an acknowledgment of at least some responsibility was the most important part of a Communist's defense. Even when the evidence was debatable, a Communist was most likely to refute a misconduct allegation if he claimed to have learned a lesson from his errors. It would be a mistake to exaggerate the importance of the confession in party discipline cases, however: misconduct hearings were not self-criticism sessions, in which Communists looked into their soul, gave a detailed confession of their sins, and begged for redemption. Instead, most confessions were low-key and straightforward. A hearing might begin when an accused Communist was asked how he "appraised" (rastsenival) his conduct, prompting the response, "I believe that I committed an egregious mistake, and I promise that I will not repeat such an act again:'' 46 Or it might end with a closing statement declaring that "I agree with all the remarks that have been made. I assure the party committee that I will justify its trust through my work and my conduct:'' 47 A few Communists resorted to begging, but elaborate promises to reform were more frequent in written explanations than in spoken remarks. A majority of confessions appear to have been rote recitations of standard rhetorical formulas. '48 Some misconduct cases even hint at a more sinister conclusion: that party leaders sometimes used the "sincere" confessions of their friends as an excuse to overlook their crimes. In 1949, for example, a raikom official from Molotov Province was accused of drunkenness, bigamy, and attempted rape. Comrade G was said to have come home drunk one night, seen the family's sixteen-year-old

48

Chapter One

nurse sleeping by the stove, and "used force to compel the girl to enter into a sexual union with him"; she resisted, and just as Comrade G was pushing her into his bedroom, his wife returned home.'49 Comrade G's response to these charges was extremely unconvincing. "There was no attempt to rape the nurse, there was just playing [balovstvo], like with a child;' he assured the raikom.'50 His written explanation added that he came home drunk and "began to horse around with her [nachal ee balovatl The matter proceeded to the point where I pulled her to myself and began to kiss her. Of course, nothing more happened:'•s• This flimsy excuse was enough for the obkom, which explicitly cited "his heartfelt confession [chistoserdechnoe priznanie], his condemnation of his behavior, and his promise to reform" when it voted to limit his punishment to a reprimand, even though Comrade G had been accused of similar misconduct in the past.'52 As eager as Soviet leaders were to portray the party as a movement based on the highest ideals, many Communists were more narrowly focused on their own careers and friendships-especially in cases involving influential party leaders.

Party Discipline and the Organizational Responsibilities of Communists

If the party discipline system was intended to ensure that Communists lived up to their obligations, then one of its most important-but least sexy-tasks was to determine whether party members were fulfilling their organizational responsibilities to the movement. Some of these duties were spelled out in the party charter, such as the need to attend meetings, pay dues, and complete party assignments (porucheniia) at work; others had their basis in more informal traditions, such as the Communist's duty to protect his or her membership card from harm and to get the party's permission before switching jobs or moving to a new city. Trivial as some of these duties may seem, a failure to meet them could have serious consequences: "the violation of party discipline" (narushenie partiinoi distsipliny) was one of the leading causes of expulsion and censure throughout the postwar years, and Communists accused of unrelated wrongdoing were usually punished more severely if they had lost a membership card (partiinyi bilet), had a poor attendance record at meetings, or were delinquent with their dues. In one sense, it is unsurprising that the party disciplined members who failed to pay their dues or attend meetings-most other membership organizations would do exactly the same, after all. But the party took these offenses unusually seriously and dealt with them in several ways. First, the party reprimanded tens of thousands of party members each year when they were accused of a lack of discipline (especially if they were first-time offenders). Second, if a Communist failed to pay dues or attend meetings for three months, his PPO

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49

could declare that he had "mechanically left" the party, excluding him from its ranks but with less stigma than would be associated with the third option, expulsion. Khrushchev-era sources note that there was a "clear distinction" between expulsion and mechanical exclusion: the former was a severe punishment, while the latter was intended for members "who did not discredit themselves, but who turned out to be unprepared to fulfill the high responsibilities of a CPSU member:''53 The party's attitude toward its members' organizational duties went deeper, however, and was based on an extremely strict conception of "party discipline" -an idea analogous to "military discipline" that emphasized efficiency, obedience, dedication, and even "battle-readiness" (boesposobnost). Some of this stringency came from the Bolsheviks' history as a revolutionary movement, since tight organization and strict discipline had been crucial to the movement's prerevolutionary identity and had been linked to the struggle with factionalism in the 1920s.'54 In the early years after the revolution, the concept of party discipline was closely linked to the idea of democratic centralism: a Communist was allowed to argue passionately for his or her beliefs until the moment when the party had made up its mind, but was then expected to fight wholeheartedly to implement its decisions. When the party cracked down on a faction like the Worker's Opposition, it consistently argued that it had violated the norms of party discipline-a fact that helped shape the party's approach to purging in the 1930s. The postwar party was almost entirely free of faction-fighting and serious ideological debate, but it faced a new challengethe influx of new, inexperienced members, many of whom were slow to attend meetings or pay their dues. This made "the violation of party discipline" a serious postwar problem. A substantial fraction of party discipline cases involved a more serious infraction: a Communist's desire to change jobs without the permission of local party leaders. In his memoir One World, former US presidential candidate Wendell Willkie described his shock that Communists could not change jobs at will, referring to a wartime conversation he had with a party member on a visit to the USSR. "Suppose-in ordinary times, not wartime-suppose you don't like your director here. Can you leave and get a job in some other factory?" he asked. The Communist replied, "Most workers could, but as a party member I must stay where the party thinks I can do the most good;' and when pressed, added, "That's for those in authority to saY:''55 In fact, a Communist who changed jobs without permission was likely to be expelled from the party, especially if he or she moved to a new city or region in the process. Party sources emphasized that "elementary" tasks like the payment of dues were not mere formalities, but were "indicator[ s] of a Communist's discipline and his ties to the party:''56 "A true Communist sees in his party card an expression of the party's trust in him;' added a 1962 pamphlet. ''A person who values that trust will treat his party card with great solicitude:''57

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The treatment of party membership cards is a perfect illustration of the regime's approach to discipline. Membership cards had long been the subject of party mythology: the poet Aleksandr Bezymenskii wrote a famous poem about a Communist who kept his membership card by his heart,'58 and the 1935 film The Party Card was based on the widespread fear that class enemies could infiltrate the party with the help of stolen party cards.'59 These paranoid worries had largely subsided by the postwar years. Communists who had lost their membership card on German-occupied territory were more likely to be seen as collaborators (as will be discussed in chapter 2), but the loss of party cards was primarily frowned upon because of the apparent negligence and sloppiness of the offender. Nevertheless, Communists of the late Stalin years were subjected to surprisingly tough disciplinary measures when they lost their membership cards. A Communist who lost his or her card a first time was unlikely to be expelled, but sure to be reprimanded; a repeat offender was almost certain to be thrown out of the party. What makes this trend particularly striking is that there were essentially no extenuating circumstances that could excuse the loss of a party card before Stalin's death. In June 1951, for example, a Communist at Kalinin's train-car factory was even reprimanded for losing his party card when he was robbed while suffering a heart attack!' 60 On average, the party expelled at least six thousand members for the loss of their party card every year between 1945 and 1953 (more than 5 percent of all expulsions) and reprimanded tens of thousands more. The number of expulsions plummeted in the Khrushchev years, however, dropping to a mere 356 in 1960 and typically hovering around one percent of all expulsions.' 6' The regime's treatment of other "violations of party discipline" followed a similar pattern. The party maintained the goal of ensuring that its members were disciplined Communists throughout its history, guaranteeing that cases dealing with a member's failure to meet his or her organizational obligations would always be among the most common in the party discipline system. The concept had often been politically tinged during the prewar Stalin years, when a failure to support central party policies was sometimes seen as evidence of political disloyalty; during the postwar Stalin years, the party took a rigid and inflexible approach to infractions like the failure to pay dues and (especially) the loss of a party card, actively disciplining any Communists who failed to follow party instructions to the letter and using both expulsion and mechanical exclusion to achieve this objective. Under Khrushchev, finally, the party leadership took a more rational approach to party discipline cases, abandoning the late Stalin era's rigid and narrow focus on a Communist's discipline and obedience and focusing more closely on how active and energetic its members were. Even then, however, a Communist's attitude to his or her duties as a party member was seen as a basic matter of personal character that could have an impact on the outcome of any party misconduct investigation. Party discipline was always

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5l

a focus of the regime, but that focus became less intense and more reasonable after Stalin's death.

Criminal Law and Party Discipline The party discipline system, in short, was based on the idea that Communists were leaders at home and at work whose behavior should be held to a higher standard than that of other citizens. In practice, the fact that Communists were also the most politically powerful figures in Soviet society sometimes threatened the legitimacy of the party discipline process. Some party officials (see chapter 4) believed that the perquisites of office-holding and party membership included the right to engage in petty corruption. Some Communist leaderseven officials who were otherwise honest and professional-covered up the misconduct of their comrades out of the fear that its public unveiling would tarnish the party's reputation. Some Communists, finally, took advantage of their party membership (and of a series of ambiguities in the Soviet political system) to avoid prosecution in court.'62 This meant, perversely, that the behavior of Communists was sometimes held to a lower standard than that of their peers, and that the inner workings of the party discipline system could look very different for high-ranking officials and the party rank-and-file. In theory, the relationship between criminal law and party discipline was based on two simple principles. First, members of the Communist Party were to be held to a higher standard in their personal behavior than the other members of Soviet society; they were subject both to the law and to the demands of the party's internal disciplinary system. Party membership, after all, was a privilege granted to model citizens, not a right, and those Communists whose conduct damaged their authority or threatened the party's reputation forfeited their place in the country's political elite even when they did not break the law. A 1936 resolution of the KPK's Third Plenum summed up the party's official stance, declaring that party members, just like non-members, are responsible under Soviet law for crimes they commit before the state. A party punishment and in particular expulsion from the party are the most severe forms of punishment for a Bolshevik, but this penalty cannot in any way replace a punishment which is levied in court or in an administrative manner.' 63 This resolution remained in force during the postwar era. Second, if a party member's misconduct violated the law, then the criminal justice system and the party discipline system would each organize an independent investigation of the Communist's behavior. The party would be

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the first to judge the misconduct of its members (if the party had its way, at least), but all Soviet citizens guilty of a crime would have to answer for their offenses in court. A 1938 resolution "On Sanctioning Arrests" issued by the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers shaped the regime's procedures in cases where a Communist was accused of a crime, requiring that prosecutors get the written "sanction" (sanktsiia) of a raikom secretary before a Communist could be taken into custody. As Yoram Gorlizki has noted, the resolution was a response to the Great Terror intended to end the indignity whereby Communists were sent to jail before party organs had had the chance to expel them; it was based on the assumption that party organs would routinely approve any reasonable arrest request. '64 As simple as these principles might appear, they proved surprisingly difficult to enforce consistently. Party organizations generally agreed on the need to hold the behavior of Communists to a higher standard than that of other citizens: although some party members argued against expulsion by claiming that they had been acquitted in court or had been given only a light sentence, they were nearly always expelled from the party. Furthermore, Communists accused of violent crimes, like murder and armed robbery, were routinely expelled from the party and sentenced to prison.'65 Nevertheless, the rules outlined above created a series of ambiguities that enabled some corrupt officials to escape prosecution, especially given that party organizations were given the right to supervise all state institutions, including the procuracy.'66 As shown in chapter 4, some raikom secretaries construed the 1938 arrest resolution as blanket permission to block the prosecution of Communists as they saw fit, using this rule either to prevent the prosecution of their friends and cronies or even to impede the prosecution of any Communist in the districts they oversaw.'67 The Nineteenth Party Congress was apparently responding to this trend when it added a provision to the party charter declaring that "in those cases when a party member has committed an offense punishable in a court of law, he is expelled from the party with a report on the offense to the administrative and judicial authorities";' 68 this provision was intended to reiterate that all Communists guilty of crimes needed to be expelled and prosecuted, but some local officials interpreted it as license to block the prosecution of all Communists unless they had been expelled from the party.'69 Nikita Khrushchev therefore launched a campaign against party interference in criminal prosecutions soon after he took power, and in 1961, the Twenty-Second Congress amended the party charter to read, "If a member of the party commits an offense, punishable under the criminal code, he is expelled from the party and prosecuted according to the law:'' 70 The relationship between party discipline and criminal law, in short, highlights many of the tensions and contradictions that defined the party discipline process. The high number of postwar conflicts between party organizations and procuracy officials over the prosecution of Communists generally supports

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53

Cynthia Hooper's argument that the postwar Soviet political system was becoming more tolerant of corruption, but it is important to remember that a majority of Communists were not shielded from prosecution; whether a Communist was subject to criminal charges depended on everything from geography and local politics to the crime he or she was accused of.' 7' Growing tensions between the criminal justice and party discipline systems also reflected the evolving nature of the party membership, which was becoming more bureaucratic, more white-collar, and more closely linked to the country's administrative apparatus. In fact, changes to party procedures during the 1950s and 1960s often simultaneously formalized the divide between the party membership and leadership and sought to fight bureaucracy and corruption: the 1952 party charter, after all, both shielded party officials from investigations by their PPO and declared that "there cannot be two disciplines in the party-one for leaders and another for the rank-and-file:''72 The postwar party's behavioral norms for its members, in short, were defined both by the party's growing bureaucratization and by the leadership's efforts to counteract this trend.

CHAPTER TWO

The Last Purge The Expulsion

of POWs and

Communists

Who Lived on Occupied Territory

0

MAY 6, 1 9 4 6, the party committee of the GPZ-3 ball-bearing factory in Saratov heard a case that at first sounds trivial in nature, but which was repeated thousands of times in the postwar Soviet Union. The accused Communist, Comrade T, was charged with burning his party membership card as the Germans approached his home near Moscow in 1941, amidst rumors that the Nazis would kill all the Communists they encountered. After being evacuated to Saratov, Comrade T hid his supposed crime for nearly five years before confessing in early 1946. His confession sparked a bitter and contentious discussion among the Communists in the factory.' Comrade T's primary party organization was inclined to treat him leniently, voting to limit his punishment to a reprimand. (He was, the committee noted, "an energetic and enterprising worker" who routinely completed his assignments and had won "an array of prizes" from the government.) But the party committee of the full factory strenuously objected to this decision. Comrade T had shown "cowardice and faint-heartedness" (trusost' i malodushie), one committee member declared; he had "lost his nerve and was ready to flee the city in a moment that was difficult for him;' another added. Every subsequent speaker agreed. One noted that "on the front a party member cannot destroy his party card until the last moment, and Comrade T was in a much better position than a soldier on the front line;' and the committee chairman delivered an especially biting rebuke: Comrade T had "placed his own life above the party" and therefore deserved expulsion from its ranks. The committee agreed, unanimously endorsing his expulsion! Comrade T's case was in some ways unsurprising, given the devastating effects of World War II on Soviet society. Between the German invasion of June 22, 1941, and the Soviet victory of May9, 1945, approximately 27 million Soviet citizens were killed in the war. 3 Germany and its allies occupied large stretches of Soviet territory, including most of Ukraine, Belarus, the Crimea, the Baltic states, and the Caucasus; 4 at least 17 million citizens were evacuated to safety in the USSR's interior from their homes near the front. 5 The economic effects of occupation and evacuation were devastating-occupied regions had N

The Last Purge

55

contained more than 40 percent of the country's prewar population, 40 percent of its grain, and 6o percent of its livestock6 -and the brutal occupation regime traumatized the country still further. The Great Patriotic War proved to be the most trying period in twentieth-century Russia's troubled history, making the wartime behavior of the population a central concern of postwar politics. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens faced the harsh judgment of the regime in the years after the war. Between 1943 and 1953, the Soviet secret police arrested more than 25o,ooo citizens on charges of "treachery and collaboration with the German occupiers" (predatel'stvo i posobnichestvo nemetskim okkupantam)7 and held a series of war crimes trials against citizens who had aided the Germans or taken part in the Holocaust;8 before the war had ended, thousands of other alleged collaborators were shot by security forces without an arrest or a trial. 9 In every republic whose territory had been occupied, the party took efforts to purge the bureaucracy of officials who had collaborated with the Germans. 10 The regime also targeted large numbers of citizens who would typically be considered innocent victims by Western audiences. Red Army soldiers who had spent time as German prisoners of war faced widespread stigmatization and state discrimination, to the point where some were sentenced to the Gulag, while supposedly "voluntary" guest workers sent to the German Reich by the Nazis were subjected to exacting investigations upon their return." Many Soviet citizens who had lived on occupied territory recalled years later that the period of German rule had been a crucially important time in their lives-both because of the oppression of the Germans and because of the discrimination and stigmatization they suffered for years afterward at the hands of the Soviet regime.,, Although the regime was concerned with the wartime behavior of all its citizens, it was particularly worried about the conduct of the country's Communists. Between 1943 and 1953, the party therefore launched a sweeping purge of Communists guilty of "unworthy conduct" in the war, ultimately expelling more than 15o,ooo party members; this purge was largely conducted outside the public eye, but scholars like Amir Weiner have restored it to a central place in postwar Soviet history.'3 With only a few exceptions, Communists were ordered to flee German-occupied land for cities farther from the front; a majority of purge victims were therefore party members who disobeyed these orders. Thousands more had become German POWs while serving in the Red Army, a supposed sign of cowardice, disloyalty, or a lack of military discipline. Communists who had spent time on occupied soil or in German captivity were asked to explain their wartime behavior and prove that they had actively struggled for the Soviet Union. They faced expulsion unless they could meet an extremely high burden of proof, requiring them to establish that they had been trapped on occupied territory or taken prisoner against their will and that they had resisted the Nazi invasion. In all, roughly 3.8 percent of the party's prewar Communists were expelled for "unworthy conduct on occupied territory or in captivity;' and in regions that fell under Nazi occupation, the total exceeded 10 percent.'4 The

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campaign against POWs and Communists who had lived on occupied soil can therefore be seen as the last major party purge in Soviet history. The objectives and meaning of the postwar purge were not always obvious, however. Official sources emphasized the need for party organs to look into the behavior of all Communists who had lived on occupied soil or in captivity, but they never explained the precise motivation behind these investigations. Amir Weiner has explained the purge's harshness by linking it to the party's ethos of purity and purification;'5 Hiroaki Kuromiya has suggested that the regime's concept of"enemies" was transformed as Stalin consolidated his power, with the regime's foe changing from "class enemies" to class-neutral "enemies of the people" to actual national enemies in World War II and its aftermath.' 6 Although the postwar purge does resemble earlier Soviet purges in some respects, its timing was problematic: as noted in chapter 1, it was conducted during a period when the party leadership had otherwise abandoned the mass purge and was less interested in seeking out enemies and ensuring the social and ideological purity of its membership rolls than it had ever been before. Party officials recognized this apparent contradiction and frequently demanded that investigations be careful, individual, and attentive to the rights of the accused-a decision that rarely helped the Communists under investigation, but nevertheless highlighted the purge's problematic-even anachronistic-nature. This chapter will argue that the postwar purge resulted from the regime's fears about the reliability and activism of the party faithful, but was driven far more by concerns over "passivity" and discipline than it was by worries about crimes like collaboration and treason. Party leaders were suspicious of Communists who had lived in captivity or on German -occupied territory and knew that some of those citizens had betrayed their country; they therefore demanded a lengthy explanation of how party members had behaved when they came into contact with the Nazis during the war. Nevertheless, the vast majority of expelled Communists were not accused of collaboration or treason, but were charged instead with the less severe but far murkier offenses of"unworthy conduct" and "passivity:''7 Like Comrade T, they had failed to place the interests of the party ahead of their personal interests, even at the risk of their lives, often violating party discipline through the destruction of their membership card and the failure to obey party directives. The Soviet party purge therefore fits into a larger pattern of postwar politics, in which governments from Paris to Prague sought to limit the privileges of the elite to people who had fully supported the war effort. The postwar purge went much further than similar efforts across Europe, but its comprehensiveness was based more on the regime's vision of party discipline and on its ability (as an authoritarian government) to translate its steadfast vision into reality than it was on its desire to vanquish "enemies" in a traditionally Stalinist fashion. The postwar purge was shaped in part by worries over loyalty, but at its heart it was most concerned with the discipline and enthusiasm of the country's Communists.

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Retribution and the Civic Purge in Europe (and Beyond) When past scholars have examined the Communist Party's postwar purge, they have usually treated it as a distinctively Soviet phenomenon. Amir Weiner, for example, begins his groundbreaking study of the purge by placing it in the context of a larger revolutionary mindset, linking it to past Soviet purges: The institutions of purge and verification were born with the Bolshevik Party itself. The quest for purity among the revolutionaries' ranks was at the heart of the Marxist-Leninist ethos. As the self-appointed vanguard and guardian of purity of the chosen class, charged with the messianic crusade to transform society in the face of open hostility before and after taking power, the party was keen on maintaining the purity of the chosen few. And as the virus of compromise and self-doubt was deeply rooted in the souls of many members of the chosen class, the party leadership saddled itself with the daunting task of constant and relentless purification of itself and its rank and file.' 8 This theory has much to recommend it. The political rhetoric of the 1940s sometimes mirrored the language of the 1930s, occasionally justifying the purge by glorifying the party's "purity" (chistota) and calling for Communists to remain vigilant at all times;'9 moreover, as will be shown in this chapter, the Soviet postwar purge was driven in part by the regime's insistence that party members show great personal discipline at all times-an insistence that began well before 1941 but was accentuated by the pressures of war. Nevertheless, as extreme as the Soviet purge was in its scope and thoroughness, it was actually part of a Europe-wide trend of punishing citizens whose actions fell short of what their country required, but were less serious than treason or collaboration.'0 World War II and the Nazi occupation were such devastating experiences that postwar governments across Europe grappled with the conflict's legacy through civic purges that were similar to-if less comprehensive than-the party's postwar Soviet purge. In fact, in the words of one eminent historian, postwar Europe witnessed a "brutal and sweeping pattern of retribution'' that, "even by the most conservative estimates;' targeted "2 or 3 percent of the population formerly under German occupation:' Issues of retribution were most prominent in Eastern and Central Europe, but affected nearly every country on the continent, with most states pursuing several different forms of retribution. Nearly every country in Europe witnessed a round of what Benjamin Frommer terms "wild retribution;' in which partisans (and other citizens who did not officially represent the state) took the initiative in seeking revenge against collaborators, often killing Nazi sympathizers without a trial or shaving the heads of women accused of "horizontal collaboration:'22 Nearly all countries held collaboration trials for citizens accused of particularly serious crimes; three countries that had abolished 21

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capital punishment before the war (Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway) even retroactively reestablished the death penalty for collaborators. 23 A majority of European states sought to purge collaborators from local government and the civil service, and many attempted to limit the civic role of citizens with ties to the occupiers. 24 In Belgium, for instance, seventy thousand citizens were barred from public office-holding and educational work for the rest of their lives, while in the Netherlands, 107,000 citizens were banned from voting for a decade; in all, roughly 1 percent of the postwar Dutch and Belgian population received some sort of ban on civic involvement. 25 Each of these varieties of postwar retribution was pursued in some form by the Stalinist regime, and the last-the civic purgewas similar in many respects to the Soviet purge considered in this chapter. The French civic purge, for example, had much in common with the USSR's postwar party purge. 26 France established a two-tiered system of justice for wartime crimes even before the war's conclusion, trying collaboration cases in court and pursuing the lesser offense of"national unworthiness" (indignite nationale) in civic chambers. The latter crime was extremely complex, as a state ordinance explained: The criminal conduct of those who collaborated with the enemy did not always take the form of a specific act for which there could be provided a specific penalty ... under a strict interpretation of the law. Frequently it has been a question of antinational activity reprehensible in itsel£ Moreover, the disciplinary measures by which unworthy officials could be removed from the administration are not applicable to other sections of society. And it is as necessary to bar certain individuals from various elective, economic, and professional positions which give their incumbents political influence, as it is to eliminate others from the ranks of the administration. Any Frenchman who, even without having violated an existing penal law, has been guilty of activity defined as antinational, has degraded himself; he is an unworthy citizen whose rights must be restricted in so far as he has failed in his duties. 27 In fact, "national unworthiness" was not officially a crime: it was a "state" into which one entered by committing unworthy acts during the occupation, and once a citizen was declared to have entered a "state of national unworthiness:' he or she was given a civil sentence of "national degradation" (degradation nationale) for a term of five years to life. A "degraded" citizen lost the right to vote and to be elected to office; to be employed as a lawyer, judge, banker, public school teacher, civil servant, or journalist; to serve as an officer in a professional organization; to wear war decorations; and to bear arms. 28 Many of these same privileges were also denied, in practice, to expelled Soviet Communists who had lived on occupied territory or spent time as German POWs. The French prosecution of citizens guilty of "national unworthiness" was reminiscent of the Soviet postwar purge in other ways as well; its rhetoric

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frequently referenced the "duties" of citizens, and even its name evokes the Soviet term "unworthy conduct on occupied territory:' Furthermore, as Peter Novick points out, the concept of national degradation was based on criteria that "were not legalistic, but moral;'•9 and did not necessarily depend on the commission of specific offenses. Certain acts carried an automatic presumption of guilt-such as producing propaganda for the Vichy regime or serving as a member of a collaborationist group-but the law was broad enough to allow for the "degradation'' of other citizens as well. (A doctor who certified the health of forced laborers could be charged with "national unworthiness;' for instance.) In all, roughly fifty thousand French citizens were subjected to "national degradation'' during the national epuration (or purge), and another eleven thousand were fired from the civil service. 30 In the years before the Communist takeover, the Czech lands pursued a similar campaign of retribution against Nazi collaborators, as Benjamin Frommer shows. The "Great Decree" ofJuly 9, 1945, provided for the trial of"Nazi criminals, traitors, and their accomplices" in a series of people's courts; major war criminals, by contrast, were tried at the National Court in Prague. When it became clear that the people's courts would not be able to try all the defendants before them (and that some defendants might not actually have broken the law), the government added a "Small Decree;' which allowed local commissions to investigate citizens for "offenses against the national honor:' In the words of the decree, Whoever, during the period of heightened danger to the Republic ... , undermined public morale by unbecoming behavior insulting to the national sentiments of the Czech or Slovak people, will be punished-if the act is not a criminal offense punishable by the courts-by District National Committees with up to one year in prison, a fine of up to 1,ooo,ooo Czechoslovak crowns, or public censure, or with two or three of those punishments. 3' Czech citizens convicted under the Small Decree were often publicly censured and were denied "certificates of national reliability;' which barred them from holding any position of authority in government or pursuing an occupation vital to the country's futureY Moreover, many offenses under the Small Decree resembled examples of unworthy conduct in the USSR. Czech citizens could be punished for sending congratulatory notes to Germans, attending Germans' birthday parties, and playing cards with them; 33 a majority of the Czechs accused of close social relations with Germans were women, who were often accused of improper sexual ties to the occupiers.34 Many of these trends-such as the persecution of women who maintained close ties to the Nazis-were Europe-wide phenomena.35 Another Soviet trendthe persecution of prisoners of war-was more exceptional, although even it had analogues elsewhere in the postwar world. After all, World War II POWs were not always greeted as honored war heroes in the way that Americans have

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come to expect. Soldiers in the German, Japanese, and Soviet armies were all given firm orders not to surrender to enemy forces and could face dire consequences if they did so. 36 Japanese POWs were treated as pariahs and often became pawns in a debate about the evils of Communism when they returned from captivity in Siberia;37 although most German POWs were greeted warmly upon their return and were treated as innocent victims of Soviet crimes, some ex-prisoners were publicly denounced for betraying their fellow countrymen under Soviet captivity.38 Moreover, nearly every combatant nation feared that its POWs would be reeducated by the enemy and sought to shape the political allegiance of the soldiers it captured.39 The fear that ex-prisoners had been infected by noxious foreign influences even surfaced in America in the 1950s, with reports that Korean War veterans had been "brainwashed;' a concern that seeped into popular culture in films like The Manchurian Candidate. 40 As cruel as the USSR's treatment of its POWs could be, it is hardly a surprise that the Soviet regime was concerned about the effects of captivity on POWs and about the choices they made as prisoners and soldiers. A recent study of POWs in postwar Germany offers us a final lesson about European attitudes toward ex-prisoners. In West Germany, Frank Biess has shown, hundreds ofPOWs were accused of wrongdoing between 1948 and 1956 and became the subjects of a series of high-profile trials of so-called Kamaradenschinder ("torturers of their comrades"); convicted veterans were sentenced to prison for up to fifteen years for beating other German prisoners or for collaborating with their captors. These trials were rare (in fact, only around one hundred ex-POWs were convicted), but they became the subject of widespread publicity, inspiring even socialist newspapers to denounce the government for failing to prosecute returning POWs with a questionable past. 4 ' In East Germany, meanwhile, the Communist Party launched a Soviet-style purge of party members who had been POWs in the West or Yugoslavia, punishing even anti-fascists who had deserted from the Wehrmacht. These two histories, Biess suggests, show that the processes of "marginalization and pathologization" that surrounded the war in democracies like West Germany could be transformed into state persecution under a dictatorship. 42 The Soviet experience was a case in point. Although the USSR's party purge fit into a larger pan-European pattern of postwar retribution, it was still far more sweeping in scope than its counterparts. Czech national honor commissions initiated 179,896 cases and adjudicated 135,367, but they only convicted 46,422 citizens-a high total, but only 34.2 percent of the defendants that came before them. 43 In France, meanwhile, the population often protested the leniency and partiality of the civic chambers in investigating cases of "national unworthiness:' 44 By contrast, as will be discussed below, the USSR's postwar purge targeted a large majority of party members who had lived on occupied territory, expelling as many as 90 percent of the Ukrainian Communists who had spent time under German rule. 45 The Soviet Union was also slower than most European states to rehabilitate alleged

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collaborators: no steps were taken to reverse the purge until1954 (and the progress after 1954 was uneven), whereas many European nations had amnestied a large proportion of their war collaborators by 1951. 46 The Soviet purge, in short, falls at the extreme end of a spectrum of responses to the war that defined the approach of governments from France to Japan. Everywhere in Europe, postwar regimes sought at first to implement a simplistic, black-and-white vision of wartime wrongdoing, attempting to deny elite privileges to those who had failed to live up to their duty as citizens; in each case, however, it quickly became apparent that the issue of wartime misconduct was far more complex than this vision acknowledged and that governments needed to recognize the shades of gray in wartime behavior. (Even in Ukraine, local authorities initially resisted purging Communists who had lived on German-occupied land before eventually achieving an expulsion rate that exceeded 90 percent of those who lived under occupation.) Only in the Soviet Union did a black-and-white vision of wartime behavior win out. One factor pushing the USSR toward a stringent purge was the unusually devastating impact of the war on the Soviet Union, which lost approximately 14 percent of its population in World War IIY The refusal of the USSR to capitulate also made a significant difference; as Tony Judt has noted, postwar regimes in Western Europe were more likely to pursue collaboration vigorously when the legitimate government went into exile and reestablished itself after the war, and the Soviet regime undertook a similarly strict purge when it regained control over its lost territory. 48 The dictatorial nature of the Stalinist regime enabled the authorities in Moscow to impose a strict vision of acceptable wartime behavior on local governments in ways that a democratic regime could not have managed, and the existence of the party itself played an important role as well. For one thing, the party discipline process gave the regime a more direct and convenient avenue for investigating the behavior of the elite than was available in any European democracy. For another, the Soviet regime had long promoted an exacting vision of military-style "party discipline:' which demanded that Communists unquestioningly obey the party's directives. If the regime had always been willing to punish passive Communists who violated discipline by losing their membership cards or failing to attend meetings, then it would surely be willing to crack down on members who failed to actively resist the Nazis in the party's hour of greatest need.

The Extent and Nature of the Purge

On January 10, 1950, a report from Ukraine's Central Committee detailed the fate of the republic's Communists who had lived on occupied territory. In all, 143,344 Communists had remained on German-occupied land (roughly a quarter of the republic's prewar party membership); of that total, 19 percent had died, 3-5 percent had left for Germany, the location of 18.7 percent was

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unknown, and 7-4 percent had either left Ukraine or were being investigated by military party organs. By the time this report was written, local Ukrainian party organizations had nearly completed the investigation of the remaining 87,959 Communists who had lived on occupied soil. Raikoms and gorkoms had heard the cases of 85,244 Communists and voted to expel9o.6 percent of them; obkoms had reviewed 80,239 of those cases, raising the expulsion rate to 92.8 percent. 49 In short, less than a tenth of the Ukrainian Communists who had remained on German-occupied territory were allowed to remain in the party, usually because they had joined the war effort as partisans. As these statistics show, the postwar purge was both massive and thorough: it led to the expulsion of a large number of Communists in absolute terms and of a startlingly high percentage of the Communists who had lived on occupied territory or spent time in German captivity. These outcomes were far from inevitable, however. In its early days, after all, the purge was beset with problems, as overworked party committees judged cases leniently, KPK officials complained about the laziness and incompetence of the investigation, and higher party organs clamored for a more exacting purge. Party organizations sometimes resisted the idea of expelling former POWs and Communists who had spent time on occupied soil; control officials sent their subordinates conflicting messages, pushing simultaneously for a faster purge and a more careful examination of individual cases. The party's central authorities in Moscow and Kyiv held firm, however. Between 1943 and 1946, the leadership repeatedly signaled its desire to cleanse the party of Communists who had failed to live up to their wartime obligations, and despite a number of obstacles, that vision was ultimately translated into reality. As Amir Weiner notes, the postwar purge began in a territory as soon as it had been liberated from the Nazis. 50 In Ukraine, the purge was announced by a resolution of the republic's Politburo on November 1, 1943, just weeks after the liberation of Kyiv; 5' the purge began in the Krasnodar Territory and Rostov Province in February and May of 1943, respectively; 5 in Kalinin Province, it began as early as 1942.B The Ukrainian resolution beginning the purge, which was typical of the party's approach throughout the USSR, announced that no Communist who had lived on occupied territory would be considered a party member until after his conduct had been investigated. It asked all Communists to write a statement detailing their activities under occupation and requesting readmission to the party, ordered gorkoms and raikoms to begin registering Communists who had lived under German rule, and demanded that unverified Communists be removed from political office. 54 Strikingly, the Ukrainian Central Committee made this decision at a time when the republic's party membership stood at a fraction of its prewar total, meaning that the leadership had chosen to prioritize the investigation of Communists who had stayed behind over the growth of the party and even the reconstruction of the economy. 55 Only winning the war was a higher priority. 2

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In the years that followed, the purge of Communists who had lived on occupied soil was characterized by two main patterns. First, in stark contrast to the procedure in other misconduct cases, Communists were generally treated more leniently by people who knew them than they were by higher-ranking officials: the expulsion rate in occupation cases was nearly always higher at the obkom level than it was at the raikom or the PPO, and obkoms often overturned the decisions oflower party organs not to expel a Communist. (Party officials sometimes worried that Communists who had lived on occupied territory would be overly lenient toward comrades guilty of "unworthy conduct:' but as Comrade T's case shows, even rank-and-file Communists from unoccupied regions were often willing to forgive the wartime transgressions of peers who were good workers.) 56 Second, the postwar purge became more thorough over time, largely through interventions by central party organs that urged local committees to conduct the purge more quickly and to expel a higher percentage of members. Together, these patterns suggest that the purge's success depended on the stubborn intervention of the central authorities, most likely because of opposition or a lack of enthusiasm from below. Consider the case of Ukraine. According to a March 1944 report, Ukraine's raikoms and gorkoms heard the cases of 11,299 Communists in the purge's first four months, expelling a mere 30 percent of them. Althoughgorkoms in Kyiv and two other cities purged a slim majority of the Communists they investigated, many localities were far less enthusiastic: only 23 percent of the investigated Communists from Poltava Province and 14.6 percent from Voroshylovhrad were expelled. On April 20, the Central Committee therefore passed a resolution denouncing the purge's implementation in Voroshylovhrad Province, sending a message to party organs throughout the republic. 57 By November 1, Ukraine's raikoms and gorkoms had heard 26,574 cases (expelling 66 percent of the Communists who came before them) and the republic's obkoms had heard 6,811 cases, expelling 5,182 Communists (or 76 percent). 58 Even then, party workers from the Central Committee criticized the purge's slow pace and berated local party organs for failing to expel officials who had discredited themselves under German rule. 59 Two years later, the Ukrainian party leadership decided that it was time to intervene yet again. On April19, 1946, Ukraine's Central Committee issued a resolution criticizing the implementation of the purge in Dnipropetrovs'k and Vinnytsia provinces, 60 leveling two main criticisms: party committees were examining misconduct cases "extremely slowly" and sometimes did not "conduct detailed and comprehensive verification of the conduct of every Communist at the enemy's rear:' 6 ' Both obkoms had investigated only a fraction of the cases overseen by their raikoms; they had left "unworthy people" in the party while simultaneously expelling some innocent Communists. The Central Committee sent its resolution to every gorkom, raikom, and obkom in the republic, requiring each obkom to send a monthly report on the purge's progress; it also ordered

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every obkom to conduct the purge as quickly as possible and to assign the "best, most experienced workers" in its apparatus to the party collegium to investigate occupation cases. 62 In the months that followed, the expulsion rate steadily increased. KPK reports from elsewhere in the Soviet Union paint a similar picture of the purge, portraying its early years as disorganized, inefficient, and less thorough than the final outcome would prove to be. Reports by KPK plenipotentiaries in Krasnodar, Rostov, Smolensk, and Kalinin accused local party officials of conducting the purge in an irresponsible, slapdash manner, examining hundreds of cases in a very brief period after months of bureaucratic inaction. Party organs frequently decided the fate of Communists who were not present, in violation of the party charter; between June and August 1945, for example, Rostov's obkom reviewed the cases of 833 Communists, only eight of whom were present, and in many instances, only two or three of the obkom bureau's eleven members were in attendance at those hearings. 63 In Krasnodar, meanwhile, party officials had an unusual amount of difficulty finding accused Communists, and misconduct cases were considered not by a formal session of the obkom, but in the informal meeting at the end, where members simply approved the recommendation before them without discussion. 64 Even more strikingly, party authorities in once-occupied regions of Russia expelled a fairly small proportion of accused Communists in the early years of the purge: by the fall of 1945, the obkom in Rostov had expelled 62.6 percent of the Communists it investigated,65 compared to 72.4 percent in Kalinin66 and 80-4 percent in Krasnodar. 67 All these reports predate Ukraine's April1946 Central Committee resolution reaffirming the postwar purge, which appears to have been a turning point in the work of party organs throughout the USSR. Some of the problems outlined above were merely signs of the difficult task facing the party: given the daunting number of Communists to investigate, few party organs had the time or energy needed to run a thorough investigation even when they were fully staffed. The slow pace of the purge may at other times have resulted from the mixed messages sent by the party leadership or the lack of enthusiasm (or even the opposition) oflocal party organs. (As Jeffrey Jones and other scholars have shown, local populations often recognized that the behavior of citizens under occupation could not always be viewed in simple black-and-white terms.) 68 Over time, however, the party became more insistent in its message that local organs needed to accelerate the purge, with monthly reports showing a rapid increase in the number of expulsions. 69 The purge may not always have been quite as thorough as it was in Ukraine, but it nevertheless reshaped the demographics of the party in every region that had fallen under occupation. The eventual success of the purge is illustrated by the Central Committee's all-union statistics on expulsion, which are summarized in table 6. Between 1941 and 1953, 150,716 Communists were expelled from the party for behavior that was officially designated as "unworthy conduct on occupied territory

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or in captivity" (nedostoinoe povedenie na okkupirovannoi territorii i v plenu); this offense was the second most common reason for expulsion from the party during this period, making up a fifth of all expulsions union-wide. The purge began with the war itself, rose to 5 percent of all expulsions in 1942, and doubled as a proportion of exclusions in each of the next two years. Roughly three-quarters of the expulsions came between 1944 and 1948, and the pace then slowed down considerably; by 1954, the number of war-related expulsions had fallen so low that party statistics no longer tracked them. By then, roughly 3.87 percent of the party's prewar membership had been purged-a figure that may even be slightly conservative, for reasons outlined below. These 150,716 expelled party members were joined by another 5,759 Communists expelled for the related offense of treason (izmena Rodine); many of these party members had been accused of collaboration with the Nazis, while others were expelled for unrelated offenses (including Soviet soldiers stationed in eastern Germany who defected to the West, often with a German lover.) 70 As table 7 shows, wartime misconduct cases were noteworthy not just for their numbers, but for the high level of scrutiny to which they were subjected. In 1945, for example, the KPK rejected 97.6 percent of appeals by Communists

TABLE 6- Expulsions for "Unworthy Conduct on Occupied Territory or in Captivity" and Treason YEAR

EXPULSIONS FOR

ExPULSIONS FOR

"UNWORTHY CONDUCT,,

TREASON

1941

28

112

1942

2,602

1,076

1943

5,276

1,500

1944

16,640

865 822

1945

24,667

1946

31,282

372

1947

22,722

276

1948

20,737

198

1949

20,737

176

1950

6,595

157

1951

6,766

102

1952

1,743

49

1953

525

54

150,716

5,759

TOTAL

RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 3, ll. 64, 150, and 230; d. 4, ll. 77 and 167; d. 5, ll. 77 and 166; d. 6, ll. 73 and 174; d. 7,ll. 68 and 164; d. 8, II. 76 and 175.

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TABLE 7-Appeals to the KPK by Communists Expelled for "Unworthy Conduct under Occupation or in Captivity," 1945-1953 YEAR

APPEALS OF OCCUPATION/ POW CASES

1945

2,445

KPKcoNFIRMATION RATE FOR APPEALS OF ALL OTHER EXPULSIONS

EXPULSIONS

PERCENT CONFIRMED

35.96%

2,386

97.59%

78.45%

PERCENTAGE OF ALL APPEALS

1946

2,588

29.88%

2,503

96.72%

87.09%

1947

1,869

22.90%

1,844

98.66%

87.64%

1948

1,624

17.56%

1,609

99.08%

85.07%

1949

1,363

l1.40%

1,359

99.71%

86.65%

1950

829

6.42%

822

99.16%

86.31%

1951

387

5.99%

372

96.12%

76.89%

545

5.84%

528

96.88%

72.80%

1952 1953

See RGAN1 f. 6, o. 6, dd. 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 1013, I. 1 in each case. These statistics include both occupation and captivity cases.

expelled for unworthy wartime conduct-a rate nearly twenty percentage points higher than in other misconduct cases. In 1949, only four Communists managed to convince the KPK that they had been wrongfully expelled for failing to evacuate-four Communists out of a grand total of 1,363! Although central sources include very little data on the purge's final results, especially in southern Russia, Ukrainian sources uniformly show a high expulsion rate. As ofJuly 1950, Ukrainian obkoms had expelled 93-5 percent of the Communists who came before them in Voroshylovhrad, 97·3 percent in Dnipropetrovs'k, 87.0 percent in Vinnytsia, 90.9 percent in Zhytomyr, 98.2 percent in Kamenets-Podol'skii, and 88.o percent in Kyiv/' The KPK, in short, sent local party organs a consistent message that cases of unworthy wartime conduct were to be viewed with great skepticism, and the country's obkoms eventually got the message. The expulsion of Communists who had lived on occupied territory was only part of the postwar purge, however; it was accompanied by a similar (and often overlapping) purge of Communists who had been POWs. The party's official statistics on expulsion, listed in table 6, combined cases of unworthy conduct "on occupied territory" and "in captivity;' in part because many accused Communists spent time both in captivity and on occupied soil and in part because the two offenses were viewed as analogous. Archival data about the fate of POWs is often difficult to find: much of the purge took place in military party organizations, soon after the Red Army had completed the so-called "filtration" of Communists liberated from POW camps, but these files remain closed

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to researchers. Other ex-prisoners went on to live on occupied territory or to rejoin the Red Army, concealing their POW status for months or years and only being discovered when they applied for a new party card. As a result, the purge of ex-POWs was far less organized than the purge of Communists who had lived on occupied territory. Most former POWs were expelled from the party routinely, via a process that resembled the case of Comrade T (which opened the chapter). Some cases, however, followed a second pattern. Although most ex-POWs were expelled for "unworthy conduct in captivity;' some party organs refused to expel the accused, instead declaring them to have "mechanically dropped out" of the party (mekhanicheski vybyli) by failing to pay dues or participate in party meetings during their captivity. (This tactic pushed the bounds of credibility-a Communist could hardly be faulted for failing to attend party meetings while serving time in a German internment camp-but allowed party officials to avoid stigmatizing POWs or staining their record with the taint of cowardice.) Many ex-POWs asked to be excluded from the party mechanically, presumably to avoid the stigma of expulsion/ and even some Communists who had lived on occupied territory told investigators that they wanted to be "mechanically" excluded, rather than expelled/3 These cases most likely numbered in the thousands (pushing the total number of expulsions beyond the figure of 150,716 cited above), and they reveal two important facts about the process: the discomfort of at least some Communists with the prospect of expelling ex-POWs and the close linkage between the postwar purge and the broader concept of "party discipline:' At its heart, after all, the postwar purge was meant to discipline Communists who had failed to obey the regime's orders at its time of greatest need. The result of the party's efforts, in short, was a massive and exacting purge of POWs and of Communists who had lived on occupied territory. The success of the purge appears to have been ensured by pressure from high-ranking officials in Moscow and Kyiv; party organizations often cooperated closely with secret police officers in investigating Communists' behavior on occupied soil and in captivity/4 To be sure, the postwar party purge was not a simple topdown phenomenon: although some Soviet citizens recognized the ambiguity in their peers' behavior, the Nazi occupation had left a traumatized and divided population in its wake,75 which meant that many Soviet citizens were furious at the men and women who had lived under German rule and were happy to denounce them to the authorities/6 (Many misconduct cases, in fact, depended on denunciations from everyday citizens-sometimes those with a personal axe to grind and sometimes those who were furious about the wartime behavior of their peers.) As late as the Khrushchev years, some Soviet citizens were angry at ex-Communists who had lived under occupation or in German captivity, reacting suspiciously when party authorities were too quick to rehabilitate the victims of the purge. These complex politics created an explosive situation in many localities that had survived the occupation and helped to ensure the purge's 2

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success. Local officials often ran into trouble implementing the purge-sometimes through incompetence, sometimes through a lack of enthusiasm-but the central authorities were all too happy to impose their uncompromising vision of wartime behavior on party organs throughout the USSR.

Defining "Unworthy Conduct" and Passivity under the Occupation The main accusation facing Communists who had lived under German rule-that they were guilty of "unworthy conduct on occupied territory" -was extremely vague. It had been widely understood since 1941 that Communists were expected either to leave occupied territory or to join the resistance, but the origins of this order were unclear; some sources denounced Communists for failing to obey Stalin's instructions in his July 3, 1941, radio address, but that speech never gave party members specific orders or directions/7 Moreover, official documents describing the purge were often startlingly vague about its motivations, taking it for granted that the regime's objectives were clear/8 On the one hand, many documents acknowledged that Communists who failed to evacuate had tried unsuccessfully to do so, making their actions appear less sinister, and most Communists expelled in the postwar purge were not described by terms like "enemy" (vrag), "traitor" (izmennik or predate/}, or even "collaborator" (posobnik). On the other hand, case files involving "unworthy conduct" are dominated by discussions of a series of incriminating acts that called the Communist's loyalty into question. Nearly everyone who lived under German rule had committed at least one of these misdeeds, which ranged from the destruction of a party card to close social ties with the Nazis/9 Nevertheless, even in the rare instances where a Communist's record was otherwise spotless, he or she faced a strong presumption of guilt and was almost certain to be expelled from the party for "passivity" -an extremely serious offense. After all, every Communist was required to "struggle actively" against the Germans, so only clear proof of a party member's energetic resistance could save him or her from expulsion. The most serious offense a Communist could commit on occupied territory was, of course, collaboration with the Nazis, and many Communists accused of lesser offenses were viewed with suspicion by the regime. Surprisingly few party members were accused of outright support for Nazi rule, however-partly because the most serious offenders had often fled the country or been shot by partisans or the secret police before the purge began. (In fact, according to table 6, Communists expelled for "unworthy conduct" outnumbered those expelled for "treason'' by a margin of 26 to 1.) In the context of the purge, the term "traitor" was largely reserved for low-level Communists who had supported the Nazis as policemen, translators for the Gestapo, or the administrators of Germanorganized agricultural communes; 80 a man expelled by the party in 1949 for concealing his work as an occupation-era police clerk was berated by his comrades

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as a "traitor" (izmennik) who had not "fulfilled his duty as a Soviet citizen;' for instance. 8' Offenses like these could lead to a jail sentence and were so serious that they tarred not only the offender, but his or her family as well;B2 many Soviet citizens apparently detested collaborators even more than the Germans themselves. 83 Many more Communists were punished for helping the Germans with mundane labor that had little political significance (like sewing, doing laundry, providing firewood, or clearing snow from the streets) or for doing work that arguably benefited society (say, as a nurse at the city hospital). 84 These actions generally did not result in a charge of "treachery;' but were viewed with suspicion nonetheless, even though at least some citizens who worked for the Nazis were also active with the resistance. 85 Accused Communists could rarely avoid expulsion by arguing that their labor was involuntary, 86 especially if they had gone to a German labor exchange board looking for work, 87 and expulsion was all but certain if the party recovered German documents showing that an accused Communist had won an award for overfulfilling German work norms. 88 Mundane, relatively apolitical labor could get a Communist into legal trouble, but was so common that it usually did not-confirming Olga Kucherenko's argument that military and political collaboration was seen as far more serious than economic or administrative cooperation with the Germans. 89 Thousands of Communists were accused of another extremely suspicious action-registration with the German police. When the occupation began, Nazi authorities ordered the local population to register with the police, requiring registrants to tell whether they were party members. Communists were registered separately from other citizens, ordered to check in regularly with the authorities, and interrogated on their party status, their knowledge of other local Communists, and the location of partisans and underground leaders; interrogations often ended with a stern warning to work conscientiously for the Germans and to refrain from pro-Soviet agitation. 9 ° Communists who registered with the police were not typically accused of "treachery" or "collaboration;' but they were viewed suspiciously, since a Communist who survived an interrogation could easily have been an informer. Registration was one of the most common offenses committed by Communists under occupation (appearing in more than a quarter of all cases) 9', and party members often tried to justify themselves by claiming that they had been forced to register or had done so as non-Communists. 92 Especially creative Communists even claimed to have avoided registration as party members by telling the Nazis that they had been expelled from the party.93 Many other cases involved subtler accusations of pro-German sympathies, often focusing on actions by Communists that both called the loyalties of the party member into question and threatened the party's reputation. Women who slept with German soldiers and administrators were viewed harshly by both the population at large and postwar party organs; men and women with social ties to the Germans were also widely criticized, including those who drank,

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socialized, played cards, and attended New Year's parties with Nazis. 94 Party members could also get into trouble if they lived openly in areas "where they were well known to the population as a Communist"95 -a decision that both threatened the party's reputation as a force for liberation and raised questions about how the Communist in question had managed to avoid Nazi persecution. Some Communists even went beyond registering with the police: when one party member was arrested and sent to a concentration camp, his daughter got him out by collecting signatures from local residents who said that he was not really a Communist and promising that he would not fight the Germans.9 6 A female sel'sovet chairman went so far as to admit her party status under interrogation, to write an autobiography for the Germans, and to agree to the police chief's request that she not establish ties with the partisansY Cases like these threatened to shatter the population's wartime morale and to make the party itself appear disreputable and morally tainted. In a majority of purge cases, however, the party did not expel its members for betraying the USSR; it expelled them for failing to meet their responsibilities through passivity and a lack of discipline. Some Communists were expelled for misconduct during the evacuation: at a time when the regime was desperate both to move valuable economic resources to Soviet-controlled territory and to deny their use to the Germans, a Communist could demonstrate his unworthiness through negligence and self-interest. Local officials and economic administrators could be expelled for using state resources to evacuate their families, for "leaving tractors for the enemy" when ordered to evacuate the hardware of a machine tractor station, and for failing to destroy typographic equipment that the Germans could use.9 8 Communists like these were not accused of wanting to aid the Nazis, but they were punished nonetheless for the result of their actions: threatening the war effort and fueling the widespread perception that Communists had saved themselves while leaving the population to suffer. 99 The party even devoted a surprising amount of attention to whether a Communist had performed one of the duties described in chapter 1: the preservation of his or her party card. Most sources agreed that Communists could destroy their membership cards at the moment of capture, but to destroy a card prematurely was a sign of "cowardice" (trusost') and evidence that the offender had placed his or her personal interests above the common good. 100 After the war, thousands of Communists were therefore berated by the authorities if they had either destroyed their card or handed it over to the Germans. Many Communists gave elaborate explanations of how their plans to preserve their party documents had gone awry-one man said that he gave his card to his elevenyear-old son to hide, but his wife destroyed it-while many more said that they hid their cards so well so that they could not find them after the war. 10' Others claimed-sometimes truthfully, no doubt-that their cards had been destroyed when the Germans bombed their homes.' 02 None of these excuses was looked upon kindly by party organs.

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Party organs asked a final question that was more important than any other in deciding the fate of a Communist who had lived on occupied soil: did he or she "struggle actively" against the Germans? Some Communists were ordered to remain on occupied territory to complete a "special assignment" (spetszadanie), typically by serving in a partisan brigade or an underground party organization; if they failed to complete this assignment, they would be expelled from the party. One representative case involved a Ukrainian raikom secretary, expelled in 1947, who ignored instructions to organize a partisan brigade and survived the war by working as a village shoemaker; 103 a man from Tula, meanwhile, was named the head of a partisan brigade, but he allegedly did not show up when the brigade gathered, moved in with a local woman, and became a bandit!04 Even a patriotic party official could be expelled if his actions threatened the local undergroundsay, by allowing a list of party members to fall into German hands.' 05 In a sizeable minority of cases, Communists were expelled from the party merely for having lived under German rule, without having done anything especially incriminating while there. Reports by KPK officials and the Ukrainian party acknowledged (at least in principle) that good Communists could be trapped on occupied territory against their will, but once they were there, party members were required to refrain from "passivity" and to be active opponents of Nazi rule. In other words, the only way for a Communist to defeat a charge of "unworthy conduct" was to prove his or her dedication to the war effort. In January 1947, for example, the KPK's party collegium accepted the appeal of a forty-year-old woman from Tula Province. Comrade B explained that she could not flee when the Germans arrived because she needed to take care of two young children, her mother, and her blind father. But she did not stay home or collaborate with the Nazis-instead, she hid in the forest from September 1941 until May 1943, sewing clothes for the local partisan brigade until she was wounded in a German attack. Comrade B even presented testimonials endorsing her conduct from her raikom chairman, the district procurator, and a former people's judge-a group of influential local figures. 106 By the san1e token, a Communist from Kyiv Province named Comrade L was allowed to remain in the party by his obkom because he presented documents attesting to his membership in an underground organization called "Death to the German Occupiers:' Comrade L spread anti-Nazi propaganda, relayed information on German troop movements to the local partisans, and stole German supplies for use by the underground, fulfilling his wartime duties to the party.'07 To succeed, then, a Communist needed to provide documentation of his or her opposition to the Germans. Many Communists claimed to have joined the partisans or spread anti-German propaganda, but they needed papers from a recognized partisan or underground leader for their claims to be accepted. One accused Communist told the KPK that he had convinced kolkhozniki to refuse to gather grain, shot at a German convoy, and given his weapons to the Red Army; the only claim he could document, however, was that he had told his

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fellow citizens that the Red Army would win the war. 108 Another man claimed to have agitated against the Germans and to have spread word of Red Army victories, prompting a KPK worker to note, "It is possible that these two facts took place, but they are very little for a man who was on territory occupied by the Germans for six months:'109 Other accused Communists said that they had been partisans, and when asked for the names of people who could vouch for them, provided the names of dead partisan leaders;" 0 some were presumably telling the truth, while others most likely chose to list a dead partisan as a reference because he or she could not dispute their version of events. Raikoms and obkoms went to a great deal of effort to document the activities of local underground and partisan groups, often passing resolutions that officially recognized these organizations and their leaders. If an accused Communist presented a testimonial from the leader of a recognized partisan group detailing his activities under occupation, he could often remain in the party, but if he merely provided a letter from a friend claiming that he had spread anti-German propaganda, the authorities would almost certainly expel him. The postwar party purge, in short, was dominated by the question of passivity. Party and state investigators could usually point to at least one incriminating act committed by a Communist who lived on occupied territory, but they did not always leap to the conclusion that a party member who had destroyed his party card or worked for the Germans was a "traitor"; nevertheless, even in the absence of specific incriminating actions, a Communist was all but certain to be expelled unless he or she could provide proof of "active struggle'' against the Nazis. After all, Communists were meant to be model citizens and uncompromising defenders of the revolution and its principles. Those who fell short of the ideal were not always guilty of treachery, in the view of party leaders, but they surely lacked the discipline and courage needed to be a party member. 111

Gender and the Politics of Occupation One final factor shaped the postwar purge of Communists who had lived on German-occupied soil: although war is typically viewed as a male-dominated enterprise, female Communists were actually more likely than their male counterparts to have lived on occupied territory. In Smolensk Province, women made up 18.8 percent of the 1941 party membership and 27.7 percent of the Communists who lived under occupation; 35.6 percent of female Communists stayed behind, compared to 21.3 percent ofmen.' In Kalinin Province, the statistics were even more dramatic-53.69 percent of the Communists who lived under occupation were women."3 This disparity most likely resulted from three factors: many men had been drafted into the Red Army before the occupation began, male Communists were more likely than their female counterparts to hold positions of authority that would ensure their evacuation, and Communist 12

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women often had caretaking responsibilities that prevented their escape. Once the occupation ended, furthermore, party organs often judged female Communists by different standards than their male counterparts, sometimes treating them sympathetically but often viewing their ideal conduct through a highly traditionalist lens. Women and men, in short, experienced the occupation in very different ways. In recent years, scholars have turned their attention to the wartime role of Soviet women, arguing both that the war gave some women the opportunity to play traditionally male roles and that patriarchal norms often continued to block true equality;114 as Jeffrey Burds has shown, women even came to play a disproportionate role in the anti-Soviet underground in western Ukraine late in the war. 115 Nevertheless, female Communists under the occupation were expected to support the Soviet cause in ways that reflected traditional gender norms. Only a few women were disciplined for shirking military duties, including a forty-three-year-old ex-partisan from Kalinin Province accused of convincing her commander to release her from duty by falsely claiming to be pregnant,116 and most of the women who claimed to have supported the partisan movement said that they did so by preparing food and sewing clothes, not by gathering intelligence or taking part in battle. Likewise, one prominent group of women accused of betraying the USSR did so by maintaining close social or sexual ties with occupiers. Some of these women entered into lasting relationships with the Germans (like a Dnipropetrovs'k resident who married a German police officer and returned with him to the Reich) 117 while others were punished for "intimate ties" with Germans, in whose apartments they spent a lot of time. 118 These cases played an important role in shaping the way that society viewed female behavior under the occupation, as Jeffrey Jones notes, and the stigma of sexual contact with the Germans could be difficult to shake. 119 In 1948, for example, Kalinin's obkom expelled a woman for attending parties hosted by Nazis, dancing and drinking with German soldiers, and cohabiting with a German officer, even though she went on to serve in the Red Army. 12° Cases involving women who slept with German occupiers often included angry testimony from other citizens, who were frequently women themselves.12' Nevertheless, a majority of party investigations of female Communists did not focus on sexual misconduct, but on claims by the accused that they could not evacuate because they needed to care for young children, elderly parents, or a wounded husband. 122 These arguments met with mixed results, sometimes winning the sympathy of party officials but only occasionally convincing party organs to vote against expulsion. Party organs were expected to be sympathetic toward these women: one KPK report criticized the expulsion of a woman from Rostov Province whose obkom expelled her without verifying her claims that she was an invalid who was nursing a small child, had done political work among the region's women, and had saved her rural soviet's red banner from the Germans, for example.' 23 Nevertheless, although a majority of the women

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who won readmission to the party seem to have been the caretakers of young children, it appears that only a fraction of the female Communists who lived on occupied territory with young children were able to remain in the party. These cases suggest a striking conclusion: men were often expelled from the party when they failed to live up to their traditional gender roles by committing acts of "cowardice;' while women were frequently punished when they lived up to expectations that they serve as caretakers and nurturers. More broadly, the outcome of occupation-related cases involving women followed two general patterns. First, women were slightly more likely than men to appeal successfully for reinstatement in the party, although what this really means is that their chances were "very small" instead of "trivially small:' (Between 1946 and 1951, for example, the KPK restored the party membership of 5.7 percent of the women who appealed their expulsion for unworthy conduct under the occupation, compared to just 1.1 percent of men.) 124 Second, a disproportionately high percentage of the Communists with successful appeals were female. (In 1946, as table 8 shows, women made up less than a quarter of appeals to the KPK in occupation cases, but two-thirds of the Communists restored to the party.) Raion-level statistics from Kalinin Province are slightly more ambiguous than data from appeals to the KPK, as table 9 shows, but point to similar conclusions: women were expelled from the party at a lower rate than men in every raikom but one. At the same time, a majority of the Communists restored to the party were women-sometimes by an overwhelming margin. The party, in short, viewed the cases of men and women in subtly different ways. Much of this difference seems to have come from the party's view of a

TABLE 8- The Role of Gender in KPK Appeals of Occupation Cases,

1946-1951 YEAR

APPEALS BY

APPEALS

NUMBER OF

NUMBER OF

MEN ACCUSED

BY WOMEN

RESTORED

RESTORED

OF RESTORED

OF UNWORTHY

ACCUSED OF

MEN (KPK's

WOMEN (KPK's

COMMUNISTS

CONDUCT

UNWORTHY

RATE OF

RATE OF

WHO WERE

CONDUCT

REJECTION OF

REJECTION OF

WOMEN

APPEALS)

APPEALS)

PERCENTAGE

1946

1,931

657

27 (98.60%)

53 (91.93%)

66.25%

1947

1,571

298

14 (99.11%)

11 (96.31%)

44.00%

1948

1,412

212

7 (99.43%)

7 (96.70%)

50.00%

1950

719

104

5 (99.30%)

2 (98.08%)

28.57%

1951

337

so

13 (99.96%)

2 (96.00%)

13.33%

1949

RGANI f. 6, o. 6,

dd. 17, 18, 19, 21, 22.

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TABlE 9- Women in Occupation Cases In Select Raikomsof Kalin in Province RESTORED

PARTY

PARTY

EXPELLED

ACCUSED

AccusED MEN

ORGANIZATION

MEMBERS

CoMMUNISTS

WOMEN

WHO WERE

PARTY

WHO STAYED

WHO WERE

WHO WERE

EXPELLED

MEMBERS

BEHIND WHO

WOMEN

EXPELLED

WHO WERE

WERE WOMEN

WOMEN

Emel'yanovskii

60.31%

45.20%

43.42%

75.47%

81.12%

Zubtsovskii

35.63%

37.50%

73.68%

85.54%

55.56%

Oleninskii

33.58%

45.45%

92.11%

91.30%

42.86%

Rzhevskii

48.54%

30.30%

90.90%

95.38%

77.78%

Turginovskii

54.62%

45.00%

57.81%

70.21%

25.49%

Mednovskii

46.67%

18.75%

21.43%

81.25%

78.57%

Kalininskii

67.38%

65.26%

73.40%

TTsDNI f. 147, o. 3, d. 2854.

woman's child-caring responsibilities: a woman's appeal might be successful if her caretaking responsibilities explained her failure to evacuate and she had failed to compromise herself under occupation, but even a small infraction under German rule typically ensured her expulsion. This meant that although women had a powerful argument at their disposal that was unavailable to men, most female Communists who had lived on occupied territory with their small children were still expelled from the party. That fact, in turn, was indicative of larger trends in the life of the Communist Party. As Red Army service and military valor became closely linked to party membership, the values of the Soviet political elite arguably became even more masculine in nature; even the wartime roles of many female Communists had been limited to activities in the home. The Communist Party, like Soviet society as a whole, continued to fall short of its egalitarian ideals.

Former POWs in the Postwar Communist Party

Like Communists who had lived on occupied soil, the 2.8 million ex-POWs who returned home from the war were all viewed with suspicion in the years following 1945. According to the Red Army's infamous Order Number 270 (from August 1941), Soviet prisoners of war were guilty of "desertion'' or "giving themselves over" to the enemy; 125 in this order and other state decrees, the Stalinist regime criminalized the army's military discipline system and treated POWs as malicious deserters, cowards, or traitors rather than as victims. Certain groups

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of POWs were brutally punished after the war, especially those who had joined Andrei Vlasov's Liberation Army or other collaborationist forces. Of the other returned POWs, the unluckiest were imprisoned or sent to the Gulag; the vast majority faced stigma and state discrimination. Former prisoners were monitored by the interior ministry and were generally not allowed to live in Moscow, Leningrad, or Kyiv. They faced the suspicion of potential employers and the mistrust of their fellow citizens, especially after a new round of repression began in 1947, and often ended up with particularly difficult or undesirable work. As Mark Edele has noted, postwar discrimination against POWs usually resulted from institutional practice rather than from explicit policy, but that made little difference in most former prisoners' lives. '26 When it came to party members, the fate of ex-POWs was broadly similar to that of Communists who had lived under German occupation, but was often somewhat harsher. (The regime's mistreatment of POWs was typically based on laws and military orders that applied to all Soviet citizens, after all, not just on its special expectations for Communists; nevertheless, as Roger Reese points out, Communists were expected to show a higher level of motivation and leadership than other recruits. )127 A small minority of Communist ex-POWs were expelled for outright collaboration with the Germans, especially when they accepted a position overseeing POW labor or joined Nazi-organized military units like the Turkestani legion;128 these Communists faced serious legal consequences as well as expulsion from the party. A large majority of the ex-POWs in the party were accused of far less serious misconduct, however. In principle, cases of "unworthy conduct in captivity" were to be judged on their individual merits, with an informal series of mitigating circumstances and exacerbating factors helping to determine the fate of the accused. (A wounded soldier, captured without a weapon, who agitated against the Nazis in a prison camp would-in theory-be treated more leniently than an able-bodied soldier who remained passive under captivity.) In practice, however, the party once again placed an unreasonable burden of proof on accused Communists, often treating ex-POWs even more harshly than party members who had lived on German territory. Many expulsion resolutions did not even allege specific wrongdoing, but merely noted that the accused Communist "was in German captivity but could not present materials confirming his explanation of his conduct during that time:'' 29 Even former prisoners who returned to the Red Army and fought valiantly for the USSR were often expelled. Officially, the party decided whether or not to expel POWs from its ranks based on several criteria. Ex-POWs who wanted to remain Communists were to submit three sets of documents to the authorities: the "testimony of Communists.who know the circumstances under which you fell into captivity"; "the testimony of comrades, who can confirm your behavior under captivity and the circumstances of your release from captivity"; and "references of the administration and testimonials about your attitude to labor:''3° From these instructions, an accused Communist might assume that he actually had a chance to remain

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in the party, but internal documents explicitly noted the presumption of guilt facing the party's ex-POWs. A 1951 form letter from the army's Main Political Administration, for instance, urged investigators to "keep in mind that the fact of capture itself and a passive tenure in captivity are unworthy of the title of Communist (if active struggle in support of the Soviet army at the enemy's rear cannot be established by documentation):''3' In most cases, then, the biggest factor in determining the fate of a POW was the circumstance of his capture: if there was any sign that a Communist had "voluntarily" joined the Germans, he had no hope of remaining in the party. Party organs were always interested in whether a POW had been armed at the moment of capture, and practically any Communist who admitted to having been captured while carrying a weapon was expelled for "being captured by the Germans, with a weapon, without providing armed resistance:''32 If a Communist was captured without a weapon, on the other hand, party organs often assumed that he "threw away" his gun and "handed himself over into captivity without opposition:'133 A POW's only hope was to provide proof that he had resisted capture-evidence that was nearly impossible to obtain. In theory, POWshad two other ways to show that they had been seized involuntarily: they could testify that they had been seriously wounded at the time of capture or that they had subsequently tried to escape captivity. In practice, the party was extremely skeptical of these claims. In one 1947 case, the party investigated an ex-POW's story that he had been heavily wounded when captured by asking doctors to X-ray him (finding that his wounds had been mild).'34 In a 1948 case, an ex-POW said that he had been left for dead on the battlefield, carried unconscious to a sovkhoz by its workers, and then taken prisoner when the Germans captured the farm; the KPK confirmed his expulsion, even though he presented testimonials from fellow POWs, from sovkhoz workers, and even from officials at the anti-espionage agency SMERSH, all testifying to his unconscious state.'35 In a 1945 case, an accused Communist provided testimony from three fellow POWs that he had been sent to the isolation ward as punishment for trying to escape; he eventually succeeded in escaping, joined the partisans, and ended up in the Red Army, but was expelled for "cowardice" and "surrendering himself into captivity without resistance:''36 The fact that other POWs were considered unreliable witnesses made it nearly impossible to prove that a Communist's capture had been involuntary. Even after their capture, POWs were expected to avoid any behavior that could be read as "passivity" or support for the Germans. A small number of POWs joined the Turkestani or Armenian legions, but many more worked for the Germans in the camps, in skilled labor as a doctor or pharmacist, as a forced menial worker, or as a guard in the barracks.'37 The Communist mentioned above, who had been sent to the isolation ward for trying to escape, was even accused of making wooden toys for German children-an action with no military significance.'38 Party sources are not clear on whether such actions were

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seen as pro-German, or (more likely) whether they were seen as evidence of passivity, cowardice, and an unwillingness to fight against the Germans even in the midst of an internment camp. Party members sought to fight charges of passivity by claiming that they had spread anti-German propaganda within the camps, but it was incredibly difficult for them to gather credible evidence. Others POWs defended themselves by emphasizing their heroism on the field of battle. A 1943 KPK report noted that the party collegium had reviewed the cases of 179 Communists expelled for improper behavior under encirclement since 1941; in twelve instances (6.7 percent of the total), the party reinstated veterans who had "atoned for their guilt" in battle (although the report worried that the KPK had been "hasty" in three of those cases).'39 As time passed, it became even more difficult for an ex-POW to win his way back into the party through military valor. In 1949, for example, the KPK heard the case of a Communist who had been wounded and captured in November 1941; he escaped captivity after seventeen days, enrolled in the partisans, and rejoined the Red Army in March 1943, winning both the Order of Aleksandr Nevskii and the Order of the Patriotic War. Even a pair of awards for military valor and an enthusiastic statement from his partisan brigade leader were not enough to prevent his expulsion. '4° Ex-POWs could occasionally escape expulsion from the party, but only when the stars were perfectly aligned. In 1947, Molotov's obkom voted to overturn the exclusion of a man who had hidden his POW status when he joined the party. Comrade H had enlisted in the Red Army on June 24, 1941-two days after the Nazi invasion-and served in the army for a year. He spent two months under encirclement, during which time he was a German prisoner for five days before rejoining the Red Army and helping to recapture Kalinin in early 1942; he was discharged as an invalid after being severely wounded and winning a combat medal.'4 ' Several factors helped Comrade H avoid expulsion: his captivity was very short, he twice escaped the Nazis, he rejoined the army after escaping, he preserved his party card, and he informed the local MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) office that he was an ex-prisoner (as required by law). His PPO declared that he deserved expulsion, but could remain in the party because of his excellent record as a Communist.'42 Former prisoners of war, in short, faced an even higher bar to reinstatement in the party than Communists who had lived on occupied territory-a conclusion hinted at in the KPK's language. Although party documents typically used the generic term "unworthy conduct in captivity" to describe the offense committed by POWs, they also accused ex-POWs of more judgment-laden offenses, such as "cowardice" (trusost'), "faint-heartedness" (malodushie), and "giving themselves into captivity" (sdachu v plen). (The first two terms, interestingly, were most often used in occupation cases when a Communist was accused of destroying their party card or panicking during the evacuation.) Moreover, the taint of POW status often extended beyond the prisoners themselves. A

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Communist could be expelled for concealing the fact that his brother had been a POW'43 or for helping a former prisoner obtain documents allowing his demobilization.'44 In Molotov, the party even investigated a striking number of cases involving women who married ex-POWs sent into exile in the Urals.' 45 1he accusations against these women varied-some were expelled for "a lack of vigilance;' some for "ties to an alien element;' and some for "cohabitation with a Vlasovite" -but the language in these cases suggested that exiled POWs convicted of collaboration were seen as alien figures, even enemies. The idea that POWs were enemies remained on the periphery of the party's discourse, however; as in most party discipline cases, the discussion more often centered on a party member's success in fulfilling his duties. "I have always conscientiously fulfilled the obligations given to me;' one ex-POW told the party, "but I was not able to completely fulfill my duty because of a severe wound. Now I ask you to give me the possibility to be a rank-and-file Communist under civilian conditions and to show under the supervision of the party that I was and am a Communist:''46 Party hearings often focused on the importance of the party membership card and frequently involved discussions of "obligations" and "dutY:' Some party committees even decided not to expel former POWs, but to declare that they had "mechanically left" the party by failing to pay dues and attend meetings during their captivity; this choice avoided two unpalatable options-expelling a dedicated Communist because he could not document the circumstances of his capture, or leaving an ex-POW in the party at a time of elevated suspicion. Almost no one was willing to challenge the logic behind the party's expulsion of former POWs, however. One of the few exceptions was an ex-prisoner who challenged the "formalistic and incorrect" obkom resolution that expelled him in a 1948 appeal to the KPK. "You cannot imagine how difficult it is to bear such a punishment;' he wrote, "when you feel no guilt whatsoever and when at the same time you clearly recognize that the commission reached its decision not because it was just, but solely out of over-cautiousness:' In the end, neither Comrade C's eloquence nor the good word of his friends was enough to restore him to the party. The KPK rejected his appeal because of "insufficient materials about his behavior in captivity:''47 In case after case, the most important theme that emerged from the postwar purge was the importance of an extreme vision of both party and military discipline. The Red Army, after all, had sought to win the war in part through the criminalization of military discipline: its Order 270 treated prisoners of war as deserters, while Order 227 punished commanders and soldiers who retreated without permission.'48 Communists on occupied territory, moreover, were ordered to evacuate or to wage an active struggle against the enemy and were punished if they failed to do so, with very few exceptions. Both POWs and Communists who lived under occupation were viewed suspiciously, and a minority of each group was charged with collaboration, but both groups were

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more likely to be punished for failing to do their duty than for actively betraying the socialist cause; moreover, members of both groups were more likely to be punished if they failed to complete traditional duties of Communists, like the preservation of their party card. The postwar purge was not, in short, a continuation of the terror of the 1930s or an attack on enemies and traitors; it was an attack on the "passivity" of thousands of Communists and an effort to ensure the discipline of the party masses at a moment of unusually great stress on the Soviet polity. In the years that followed, the party discipline system rarely penalized Communists in as stringent or as inhumane a manner as it did during the purge, but the regime's focus on discipline (and its antipathy for "passivity") remained. The war's devastating effects on the Soviet economic and social system ensured that tight top-down control would remain the focus of the party discipline system well into the postwar era.

CHAPTER THREE

De-Stalinizing Party Discipline Purging and Politics in Postwar Expulsion Cases

0

N M A R c H 3 o , 1 9 s 3 - J u s T three weeks after the death of Joseph Stalin-the party organization of Saratov's GPZ-3 ball-bearing factory heard a case that highlights the complicated politics of the postwar Stalin years. The accused Communist, Comrade N, had failed to reveal a damning fact from his past when he joined the party eleven years before: his brother had been executed for complicity in the 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov, Leningrad's party chief, which meant that the entire family had been exiled to Kazakhstan. Comrade N's mistake would have been seen as a sign of political disloyalty and likely hostility to the regime had it been discovered in the 1930s, but his case was marked by an almost complete lack of political overtones when it was investigated in the last days of the Stalin era. "Of course [Comrade N] had only one goal on entering the party-to build a career;' one of the factory's managers declared. "He was pursuing the goals of career and other personal and selfish objectives;' another added, pointing out that the accused Communist had feared that he could not join the party or become an army officer if his past came to light. No party members argued-or even hinted-that Comrade N was a potential enemy. Instead, his wrongdoing had two parts: he was guilty of lying to the party and of "careerism;' or prioritizing his "personal goals" (lichnye tseli) over the interests of the party and the Soviet Union.' Comrade N's story highlights two important lessons about how rank-andfile Communists and party leaders viewed misconduct in the late Stalin years. First, postwar leaders were extremely worried about the threat to their policies posed by undisciplined, corrupt, and self-interested Communists who put their own interests ahead of the regime's; as shown in chapter 4, the language in Comrade N's case-especially its focus on his "personal goals" -was far more reminiscent of the rhetoric in postwar corruption investigations than it was of the language used in the purges of the 1920s or the Great Terror of the 1930s. Second, Comrade N's case highlights the fact that the leaders of the postwar Communist Party were surprisingly unconcerned with the political loyalty and ideological orthodoxy of the rank-and-file. Although the late Stalinist regime was known for its harsh approach to the population at large, postwar party organs had almost entirely abandoned the search for hidden enemies, oppositionists, and "alien elements" within their ranks. By and large, party organs 2

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no longer worried that their members were class enemies or members of the opposition or that the country's Communists were guilty of participating in "anti-Soviet conversations;' of making "anti-Soviet comments;' or of membership in "anti-Soviet organizations:'3 This chapter will tell the story of how the party viewed political misconduct by its members during the postwar Stalin era and under Khrushchev-a story of surprising continuities and often-subtle changes. By popular reputation, the late Stalin years were a harsh and brutal period in Soviet history, whereas the Khrushchev era was far more liberal and reformist. 4 These conclusions contain a great deal of truth, as most historians would agree, but when it comes to internal party life, this viewpoint often obscures more than it reveals. Most of the groups targeted by the repression of the postwar Stalin era had a marginal place within the party, a fact that helped make the investigation of so-called "political misdeeds" by Communists an almost startlingly rare phenomenon. (In 1949, for example, a mere .07 percent of all Communists were expelled from the party because of "political accusations:') 5 In the Khrushchev years, by contrast, the party leadership repudiated the crimes of the Stalinist 1930s and announced that it had restored "the Leninist norms of party life;' but continued expelling a handful of members each year for expressing "demagogic" and "anti-party" opinions-often because those members claimed that Khrushchev stood at the center of a personality cult resembling Joseph Stalin's. To be sure, the Khrushchev-era regime was far less repressive than its Stalinist predecessor, as shown by the mass release of Gulag inmates, by a sharp across-the-board drop in expulsions from the party, and by a clear decline in party discipline cases involving political accusations. 6 But when it came to the party's search for dissension within its own ranks, these changes were a consolidation and acceleration of earlier postwar trends, not a dramatic break with the past. To be sure, the party's vision of political wrongdoing underwent a subtle evolution during the two decades following the war. Party investigations of the late Stalin years often appear rigid, mechanical, and half-hearted; although Communists were almost never expelled as kulaks or Trotskyists, they were sometimes censured for lying to the party about their social origins or their past political stances-a fact that highlights the party's growing emphasis on ensuring that its members were obedient and honest in their relations to the regime. The late Stalinist party never repudiated the crimes of the 1930s and was harshly critical of anti-Soviet activity outside its ranks, but the search for internal dissension was never a major priority. The party's rhetoric and political culture began to change in the Khrushchev years, as the leadership sought to differentiate itself from the Stalin-era party, denounced the Great Terror, and announced that the Communist Party had quit persecuting its members for "political offenses:'7 This rhetoric had a surprisingly small impact on party members, however: expulsion became slightly less common, political accusations became somewhat rarer, and thousands of purge victims were allowed back into the party, but

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the regime's approach to the average Communist remained largely unchanged. In fact, by denouncing top-down political repression and singing the praises of "persuasion'' (ubezhdenie) rather than "coercion" (prinuzhdenie), Khrushchev arguably did more to revive a sense of party activism than to cut down on the political persecution of Communists-especially given that internal dissent had rarely been viewed as a serious threat since before the war. This chapter, in short, will analyze the Communist Party's vision of political wrongdoing by party members, examining both its investigations of members for anti-Soviet activity and its attitude toward the Great Terror and the crimes of the past. Khrushchev's denunciation of the Stalin personality cult helped to reshape the Soviet political atmosphere in many ways, but it was arguably less important than the party's changing demographics in reshaping the regime's attitude toward internal opposition and dissension: the party's increasingly bureaucratic character had ensured a sense of conformity that the Great Purges could not achieve on their own. The Khrushchev-era party posthumously rehabilitated tens of thousands of Great Terror victims, began to restore the party membership of Communists expelled during the postwar purge, and even investigated Communists guilty of perpetrating the most heinous crimes of the Stalin era, but none of these initiatives reached their full potential. De-Stalinization had reshaped the Communist Party's rhetoric and improved the lives of thousands of victims of Stalin without fundamentally redefining the party's approach to the political beliefs and activities of its members.

Political Transgressions in the Postwar Stalin Years

The postwar Stalin years are famous for the repressive new policies of the Soviet regime. Between 1945 and 1953, Stalin's government launched a vicious purge of the Leningrad Party organization, tightened state censorship, cracked down on literature that ignored the party line, began a campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" and intellectuals who "kowtowed to the West;' and oversaw a tough crackdown on the nationalist underground all across the USSR's western frontier. 8 Some of these policies-like the response to the so-called Leningrad Affair-were reminiscent of the terror of the 1930s, while others were based on a growing trend of cultural conservatism and chauvinistic Russian nationalism. 9 Postwar Soviet repression never reached the devastatingly high levels it had attained in 1937 and 1938, but it remained a fact of life for millions of citizens all the same. Nevertheless, the Stalinist repression of the 1940s and 1950s was often sharply different from the terror of the 1930s: the Great Purges had focused on the elite and the party membership (leading one important study to describe them as "the self-destruction of the Bolsheviks")/0 but the regime's postwar repression was nearly invisible within the party discipline system. In 1949, the year when the expulsion rate for political offenses reached its postwar height, only 4,709

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Communists were expelled because of so-called "political accusations" -3.4 percent of all expulsions and a mere .07 percent of all party members." In stark contrast to prewar practice, the party leadership no longer devoted much energy to investigating the social origins, the loyalty, or the political orthodoxy of the rank-and-file, except when it came to members who held particularly sensitive positions in society. Repressive as the Stalinist regime could be, many of its harshest policies were directed at non-Communists and at groups that were peripheral within the Communist Party; most party members were spared from investigations of their political beliefs and their class background. In fact, unless they were Jewish, rank-and-file Communists were less likely to be expelled because of their political views or social class than at any time since the revolution; party members were far more likely to be expelled for violating the 1947 theft decrees (described in chapter 4) than for misconduct calling into question their political beliefs and loyalty. In short, internal party politics had come full circle from the late 1930s, when class tensions ran high and repression centered on officials and party members. 12 A 1951 report from the KPK highlights the party's growing indifference toward political misconduct within its ranks. The number of expulsions for two related offenses-"misdeeds of a political character" and the concealment of compromising facts about a Communist's past (including his or her social origins)-added up to a mere 2.3 percent of all expulsions between 1946 and 1948 and 4-3 percent between 1948 and 1951; by contrast, they had made up 9.7 percent of expulsions between 1939 and 1941 and 4-7 percent of expulsions during the war.'3 Table 10 summarizes a second set of data-the party's annual statistics on expulsion-that lump together a slightly different set of political offenses into one larger category of misconduct: anti-Soviet agitation, ties with alien elements, the concealment of a Communist's true social origins, and the loss of vigilance. Together, these offenses made up between 1.5 percent and 3.9 percent of all expulsions in each year of the postwar Stalin era. Even in 1949, when the expulsion rate for "political misdeeds" reached its postwar height, the party only expelled one Communist in every 1,300 for these offenses, making it a statistically tiny phenomenon. The expulsion rate for political misdeeds rose somewhat in the last years of the Stalin era, but party organizations generally expended very little effort in investigations of their members for anti-regime activities and opinions. This emphasis is mirrored by a trend that will be discussed in more depth in chapter 4: cases of corruption, administrative misconduct, and economic mismanagement that had often taken on political overtones in the 1930s were now judged in a straightforwardly legalistic fashion, resulting in the expulsion of Communists for offenses like embezzlement and theft rather than "sabotage" or "wrecking:' To be sure, the USSR was full of disgruntled citizens in the war's aftermath, and some Communists did get in trouble for expressing unacceptable political beliefs. In 1946, for instance, the army's Main Political Administration

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TABLE 1 0-Expulsions for Political Misdeeds, 1945-1953 YEAR

ANTI-SOVIET AGITATION, TIES WITH ALIEN ELEMENTS, HID SOCIAL ORIGINS, LOSS OF VIGILANCE (%OF ALL EXPULSIONS)

1945

1,376 (1.5%)

1946

1,784 {1.7%)

1947

1,701 {1.4%)

1948

3,661 (2.2%)

1949

4,709 (3.4%)

1950

4,347 (2.3%)

1951

3,312 {3.9%)

1952

3,323 {3.5%)

1953

1,965 {1.5%)

RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 5, II. 77 and 166; d. 6, ll. 73 and 174; d. 7, ll. 68 and 164; d. 8, ll. 76 and 175;.d. 9, ll. 20, 69; d. 10, ll. 5, 65, 131; d. 11, ll. 5, 63, 124; d. 12, ll. 5, 54, 158, 217. The number of candidate members expelled for organizational reasons skyrocketed in 1963 and 1964, making it difficult to compare tbe percentage of expulsions for political reasons in those years.

approved the expulsion of a soldier accused of taking part in "anti-party conversations" when he complained that there was "no order" in postwar Moscow, that there was blat "everywhere;' and that the Jewish population was growing too quickly;' 4 in a similar case from the same year, another soldier was accused of drunkenly insulting two civilians and making public anti-party comments.'5 In fact, a disproportionate number of Communists expelled for making "antiparty statements" or participating in "anti-party conversations" seem to have been serving in the Red Army, suggesting either that the regime was especially eager to stifle dissent within the armed forces or that it could monitor soldiers more easily than civilians.'6 Moreover, most cases in which a Communist was accused of expressing "politically incorrect views" involved party members who made drunken or uneducated complaints about the state of affairs in the USSR, rather than Communists with a more nuanced or organized critique of the regime's politics. Whether they involved soldiers or civilians, most cases of dissent consisted of grumbling and complaining, not organized opposition or a sophisticated critique of the regime. There were exceptions to this rule, of course, but in general, the targets in political misconduct investigations were fairly peripheral within the Communist Party. A small number of party members were disciplined for praising America or expressing inappropriate views on the nascent Cold War, but they were rarely everyday citizens or public officeholders and were more likely to be

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professors, teachers, and other citizens whose job enabled them to shape the opinions of othersY What's more, asubstantial number of the Communists expelled for political unorthodoxy were Jews who either argued against or misinterpreted the regime's anti-cosmopolitan campaign of the late 1940s, or who were allegedly members of Zionist groups.•8 These trends are hardly surprising, given that the postwar Stalinist regime was tightening its control of university life and exhibiting greater anti-Semitism;•9 nevertheless, given the small share of Jews and intellectuals within the party's ranks, the regime's harsh new approach left the vast majority of party members free of persecution for the expression of unacceptable political beliefs. 20 By and large, postwar party organs also agreed on another basic principle: that seemingly compromising facts from a Communist's past did not automatically disqualify him or her from party membership as a "class enemy" or an "alien element:' In 1951, for example, the KPK received a complaint about a high-ranking health official in Riazan', who was accused of hiding his father's career as a priest and surrounding himself with doctors from suspicious class backgrounds. The KPK brushed these charges aside, however, pointing out that the man had been honest about his past and was a trustworthy Communist. 21 In 1949, a former worker at the Academy of Medical Sciences denounced several ex-colleagues as class enemies: one was the son of a noble and another's father had been arrested in 1937. But the Academy leadership responded that it already knew about its workers' past and that no one had been hiding anything.22 In 1953, finally, Viacheslav Molotov received a lengthy letter describing the "contamination'' (zasorenie) of the Kabardian Republic's party apparatus with descendants of kulaks, German "stooges" (prispeshniki), and relatives of former White officers. "I do not say that former kulaks or the sons of former kulaks should not work;' the letter-writer was quick to explain, "but how they work-that is the question:' When the obkom in Kabarda investigated the case, it found that many of the accused Communists were indeed the descendants of kulaks, but it largely exonerated them because they had been honest about their social origins and were loyal to the regime. 23 Postwar party organizations, in short, appear to have been operating under the principle that their membership rolls were free of "enemies" and "alien elements" and that a Communist's class background was not a proxy for his or her attitude to the Bolshevik government-a stark contrast with the prewar party attitude/4 Would-be Communists were still required to provide the party with a detailed autobiography and to fill out an elaborate questionnaire when they submitted their membership applications, answering queries on their social class, criminal record, nationality, education level, war service, and past tenure in the party; party organs would convene a misconduct hearing if they learned that a Communist had given a dishonest answer to any of those questions upon admission to the party. The issue at the heart of these cases, however, was not the Communist's disloyalty, but his or her "insincerity" (neiskrennost) or

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"deception of the party" (obman partii). The party expelled a small number of Communists accused of deception each year (usually when they had concealed a criminal conviction or a wartime crime when they joined the party), but it was far more likely to reprimand an insincere member than it was to expel him or her. In doing so, party organs reiterated the need for Communists to show obedience to the regime in all aspects of their personal and professional lives and showed very little interest in their members' politics, as Comrade N's case made clear. These cases were diverse in their subject matter. Some focused on trivial wrongdoing-for example, a Smolensk Communist was reprimanded in 1950 for stating his name as "Evgenii Nikolaevich'' instead of "Evdokim Nikonorovich'''5-while others dealt with more suspicious behavior, like the concealment of close contact with relatives who lived abroad. A growing number of postwar "insincerity" cases dealt with Communists who had lied about their education and training in order to get ahead in a society that increasingly favored expertise over class background.'6 Nevertheless, a plurality of insincerity cases targeted Communists accused of concealing their descent from kulaks and merchants; after all, although the party leadership was less focused on issues of class identity than it had been before the war, many rank-and-file Communists were still suspicious of the members of alien social groups and were quick to denounce them. ' 7 Local party leaders generally seem to have been sincere when they claimed that they were worried about the dishonesty of accused Communists, not about the facts that those Communists were concealing: party members were likely to be treated more leniently when they corrected their past errors themselves, and many denunciations failed to gain traction when it became clear that the accused Communist had been open about his or her past.'8 This approach had much in common with the party's simultaneous efforts to institute tight topdown control by cracking down on "violations of party discipline" like the loss of a party card or the failure to pay dues, as described in chapter 1. As time passed, an increasing number of cases began to center around an issue whose salience was growing in the postwar Soviet Union-nationality. Most of these cases dealt with Jews and ethnic Germans charged with lying about their ethnicity, although some cases dealt with Poles and Tatars; these Communists were accused of hiding their nationality by claiming a supposedly false ethnicity on official documents or by changing their names to conceal their background. (For example, many Jews wrongly claimed an ethnic identity from the Caucasus or abandoned ethnic-sounding names like Naftal Naftalievich or Moisei Moiseevich in favor of Slavic monikers like Anatolii Anatolievich or Mikhail Mikhailovich.)'9 These Communists would almost certainly not have been denied party membership if they had admitted their Jewish or German heritage, but chose to hide their ethnicity because of a more general fear of persecution in the postwar USSR. In some cases, moreover, the party cracked down on ethnically ambiguous Communists whose self-identity clashed with

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the regime's rigid and primordialist vision of nationality. 30 A 1946 case dealt with a man named Rafail Adol'fovich, who had been expelled for hiding his German ethnicity and claiming to be Russian. Rafail Adol'fovich said that he had never considered himself German, did not speak the German language, had been raised by his Russian mother and barely knew his German father, had a passport listing himself as an ethnic Russian, and had always described himself as Russian on official forms; he was, in all likelihood, telling the truth, but the party expelled him for dishonesty nonetheless.J' Although Rafail Adol'fovich may have been under increased scrutiny because of Germany's wartime unpopularity, his main problem was that his self-identity differed from that prescribed by the rigid vision of nationality favored by the regimeY These attitudes stood in stark contrast to the party's approach to its membership before the war. For much of the USSR's history, party rhetoric had emphasized the proletariat's struggle with class enemies and the importance of proworker class discrimination. Roughly 2 percent of the Communists expelled in the 1921 purge were accused of being former tsarist policemen, for example, and nearly every subsequent purge had targeted large numbers of Communists who were said to belong to a "hostile" (vrazhdebnyi) or "alien'' (chuzhdyi) element or who were accused of class "degeneration'' (pererozhdenchestvo) and "growing close to a bourgeois element:'33 In principle, the descendants of kulaks, merchants, and other class enemies were never banned from the party, but that did not stop them from being expelled because of their social origins: in the 1936 exchange of party cards, for example, 1.1 percent of purged Communists were listed simply as kulaks, 5·3 percent were "White Guards;' and another 6.1 percent were "descendants of an alien or hostile class:'34 These cases were part of a political culture dominated by questions of loyalty and identity, in which citizens' class backgrounds were often seen as proxies for their attitude to the Bolshevik government and the old regime. By the end of World War II, then, the party's internal political culture had fundamentally changed, but these changes were often the culmination of trends from the 1930s, not a sudden break with the past. In fact, although the party's changing demographics played a key role in reshaping its view of politics and social class, its changing attitude can arguably be dated to the mid-to-late 1930s, when Stalin famously declared that "a son does not answer for his father" and the announcement of the Stalin Constitution signaled a temporary loosening of the regime's policy of class discrimination. 35 By the end of the 1930s, the regime had largely eliminated even the appearance of factionalism, ensuring that there were no significant public debates within the party on any matter of importance and that organized internal opposition was a thing of the past; political dis sension was therefore mostly limited to groups on the periphery of the elite and often took the form of grumbling and complaining, which posed far less of a threat to the regime. Finally, the party's increasingly white-collar demographics meant that the suspect social classes of the past were no longer seen as a serious

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threat, allowing party leaders to consistently enforce the policy that Communists should not be expelled because of secrets in their class background unless they had lied to the regime. 36 To be sure, the postwar Communist Party could never be described as liberal: party organizations refused to reopen, reinvestigate, or reconsider the cases of Communists expelled in the purges of the 1920s and 1930s, even in the face of a steady stream of appeals from purge victims, 37 and many rank-and-file party members still reacted hostilely to members of suspect social classes. Nevertheless, the party had largely become the political monolith heralded by the regime's postwar rhetoric. It was politically secure, demographically white-collar, and ideologically unified, with few grand policy changes to push through or divisive debates to confront, at least until Khrushchev's Secret Speech. Political misdeeds by Communists barely registered on the regime's agenda.

De-Stalinization, Rehabilitation, and Political Misconduct under Khrushchev

On October 25, 1961, N. M. Shvernik-the chairman of the KPK-delivered an address to the Twenty-Second Party Congress that beautifully illustrated the Khrushchev-era regime's vision of the disciplinary system in general and its pursuit of political misconduct in particular. The speech was delivered in the midst of turbulent times, as the congress's many speakers denounced the Stalin personality cult, hailed the rehabilitation of the Great Purge's victims, celebrated the defeat of the conservative Anti-Party Group, and declared that the regime had returned to its revolutionary, Leninist roots. 38 Shvernik, in particular, emphasized the many changes that the party discipline system had undergone since Khrushchev denounced Stalin in the Secret Speech of 1956. '~fter the Twentieth Congress:' he announced, "an enormous effort was begun on the restoration and development of Leninist norms of party life, the liquidation of the consequences of the cult of personality, and the strengthening of socialist legality:'39 Shvernik drew particular attention to the KPK's rehabilitation of thousands of Communists, proclaiming that education and persuasion had replaced coercion and exclusion as principles of party discipline and that the party was united around its founding principles. "It is gratifying to report to the Twenty-Second Congress that for the previous years, no cases appeared at the Committee of Party Control in which Communists were called to party responsibility for political reasons;' Shvernik concluded. "This speaks to the unity of the ranks of our party, about the triumph of the Leninist norms of party life:'4 o Shvernik's speech perfectly encapsulated the conflicted political vision of the Khrushchev-era party. On the one hand, Shvernik continued Khrushchev's denunciation of the crimes of Stalin and drew attention to one of the most dramatic narratives in the entire history of the party: the rehabilitation

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and restoration of tens of thousands of victims of Stalin's terror. On the other hand, Shvernik's address was unrealistically self-congratulatory in at least four ways. First, although the KPK had indeed heard very few appeals by Communists expelled "for political reasons;' it continued to investigate Communists accused of criticizing Khrushchev and the de-Stalinization process throughout the period of Khrushchev's leadership. (Khrushchev himself also minimized the persecution of Soviet citizens for political crimes, falsely claiming that the USSR had no political prisoners and that most people accused of "anti-Soviet activities" were actually foreign spies.) 4' Second, although the tenor of Soviet politics had indeed changed dramatically since 1953, the origins of the decline in expulsions for "political misdeeds" and the rise in "the unity of the ranks of our party" actually predated Khrushchev's ascension to power, as shown in this chapter. Third, the Khrushchev period even witnessed an increase in certain types of political persecution. As Vladimir Kozlov has noted, there was a sharp rise in the number of citizens accused of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda in 1957-1958-a period featuring 42 percent of the convictions for those crimes in the entire period from 1956 to 1988Y Fourth, Khrushchev was always willing to use charges of "anti-party" political activity against his opponents, such as Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, and Georgii Malenkov-the ·~nti-Party Group" defeated in 1957, many of whose members were expelled from the partyY (Much ofShvernik's address focused on the crimes of the Anti-Party Group.) Khrushchev's Communist Party, in short, constantly emphasized the growing unity of its ranks and its rejection of Stalinism while exaggerating the extent to which its vision of dissent had changed and remaining intolerant of"anti-Soviet activity" and the public criticism of regime policies. As Robert Hornsby and Polly Jones have shown, the Khrushchev-era party was not free of political tensions, some of which were sparked by the Secret Speech itself. 44 Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin inspired some Communists to call on the regime to go further in its repudiation of the past and others to speak up for the late Soviet leader and his accomplishments; initially, at least, party organizations were likely to inform the Central Committee about Secret Speech-inspired outbursts at party meetings without punishing their perpetrators, treating them as "excusable excesses of emotion" that would fade with time. 45 It is hardly surprising that the Secret Speech inspired divisive discussions and low-level complaints, since it was by far the most controversial and far-reaching event in party history since before World War II. Even the leadership seemed unsure of how far to take the criticism of the past, especially once the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 had shown the dangers of unbridled dissent. 46 Over time, however, anti-leadership outbursts seem to have become isolated occurrences, and Khrushchev-era party organs began to focus on a few limited types of dissenting behavior by their members. A September 1961 case from Kalinin exemplified the regime's vision of dissenting opinion by Communists. Comrade P, a pensioner, was accused of

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making a "demagogic statement" denouncing the country's leaders at a party conference; he criticized drafts of the new party charter and announced that the leadership was establishing a new cult of personality centered on Nikita Khrushchev, much like the Stalin cult that Khrushchev had denounced five years before. The conference responded by attacking Comrade P's speech as "harmful [vrednoe], politically incorrect, demagogic, and slanderous" and noting that it was "aimed at undermining the Central Committee of the CPSU and its leadership;' but that did not stop him: the very next day, Comrade P made another similar speech. As a result, the obkom expelled him for his "anti-party" views. 47 Several of this case's main features recurred frequently in Khrushchev-era cases. Comrade P was accused of "anti-party" activities-a clear parallel with the so-called Anti-Party Group; "anti-party" offenses were rarely organized and often involved Communists who showed up drunk at party. conferences and claimed that Khrushchev's personality cult was larger than Stalin's had been. 48 Cases like these recalled the rhetoric of 1920s faction-fighting and 1930s purge trials (especially when they focused on "politically incorrect" remarks), while giving the lie to Shvernik's claim that the party had quit expelling Communists "for political reasons:' Nevertheless, the number of Communists who made their "demagogic" speeches while drunk is a telling detail: party organs were at least as concerned by the disorderly and public nature of a drunken Communist's criticisms as they were by the beliefs that underlay them. Robert Hornsby has written that "critical opinions were no longer an immediate concern [to the Khrushchev-era KGB] unless they were manifested in some concrete form. Those who kept their frustrations to themselves were generally safe from harm:' 49 Polly Jones has argued that party leaders in Moscow were often unhappier with local party authorities' inability to handle dissent than they were with the dissent itself. 5° Party discipline cases of the Khrushchev era suggest that these arguments are largely accurate: local party organs still expelled a handful of Communists who either questioned or dissented from the party's policies, but such actions were largely a thing of the past. Party authorities were loath to investigate their members for political unorthodoxy and dissent, unless those members went out of their way to cause a commotion, and many investigations of anti-Soviet behavior arose more-or-less randomly, like the case of a Noril'sk man whose politically critical letter to his father was accidentally delivered to the wrong person (who then forwarded it to the party. )51 Dissenting opinions were not the target of systematic investigation and were expressed in public fairly rarely, but the regime confronted them when necessary. In fact, the Khrushchev era witnessed the continuation and consolidation of a trend that had begun in the early postwar years: a clear drop in party discipline cases involving "anti-Soviet agitation, ties with alien elements, the concealment of social origins, and the loss of vigilance:' Although these cases were rare in the late Stalin years (as table 10 shows), they declined still further in the

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TABLE 1 1- Expulsions for Political Misdeeds, 1953-1964 YEAR

ANTI-SOVIET AGITATION, TIES WITH ALIEN ELEMENTS, HID SOCIAL ORIGINS, LOSS OF VIGILANCE (%OF ALL EXPULSIONS)

1953

1,965 ( 1.5%)

1954

2,075 (2.5%)

1955

702 {1.82%)

1956

510 (1.45%)

1957

537 {1.48%)

1958

464 {1.09%)

1959

370 {0.86%)

1960

244 (0.79%)

1961

224 (0.57%)

1962

272 (0.60%)

1963

312 {0.44%)

1964

300 (0.44%)

RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 5, II. 77 and 166; d. 6, II. 73 aod 174; d. 7, II. 68 and 164; d. 8, II. 76 and 175;.d. 9, II. 20, 69; d. 10, II. 5, 65, 131; d. 11, II. 5, 63, 124; d. 12, II. 5, 54, 158, 217.

Khrushchev years, dropping to five hundred or fewer cases union-wide by 1958 and representing an ever-shrinking share of party expulsions. To be sure, party committees were under pressure not to admit to having members guilty of misconduct that called the "political unity" of the party into question, which meant that some political misconduct cases may have been buried in the statistics as examples of"other misconduct" or "behavior unbecoming a Communist:' These cases appear to have been rare, however. The Khrushchev-era Communist Party witnessed its share of drunken "demagoguery;' as control officials termed it, but open dissent within the party was a small-scale phenomenon. There seem to have been several reasons for the near disappearance of party discipline cases involving political misconduct, even at a divisive moment like the aftermath of the Secret Speech. Over time, party members appear to have learned that if they had a problem with the regime's vision of de-Stalinization, they would not be bothered if they remained quiet, leaving drunken men like Comrade P as the main targets of the party's ire. Moreover, the citizens most likely to engage in Khrushchev-era opposition were underrepresented in the Communist Party. Robert Hornsby has noted that there were two main groups involved in political protest in the Khrushchev years, workers and the intelligentsia; 52 both groups were vastly outnumbered by administrative and white-collar

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workers in the postwar party. A 1962 KGB report noted that 8.6 percent of the authors of anonymous anti-Soviet documents were party members-a figure smaller than the percentage of Communists in the adult male population. (Most people convicted of anti-Soviet activity were men.) 53 In 1957, only 18.3 percent of citizens convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes were sluzhashchie-the biggest group in the party; 46.8 percent were workers, 9·9 percent were collective farmers, and 25.0 percent belonged to other groups, including non-kolkhoz peasants and people without an occupation, that were underrepresented in the party. 54 Moreover, of the Communists investigated by the KPK in 1959 for anti-party conversations and an absence of vigilance, there was an equal number of sluzhashchie and soldiers (20 percent each), highlighting the relatively small role in dissenting activity played by members of the party's postwar base.SS White-collar workers may have been reasonably content with Soviet life in the 1950s and 1960s, or they may have been less likely (by dint of their education) to express their grievances in public. Either way, dissenting activity within the Communist Party was largely confined to isolated grumbling, drunken complaining, and periodic pro-Stalin outbursts, rather than to more deep-seated opposition to Soviet rule. Several other factors helped lead to the Khrushchev-era decrease in cases involving anti-Soviet activity and political misconduct, but they were all consequences of one overarching trend: the party's championing of a vision of party discipline that denounced Stalinist repression and emphasized the need for the regime to replace "coercion" with "persuasion:' To begin with, the decline in political misconduct cases illustrated by table n was part of a larger decline in all expulsion cases, as discussed in chapter 1. Between 1954 and 1964, the total expulsion rate in all cases of misconduct dropped 62.7 percent, while the expulsion rate in political misconduct cases plummeted by an even greater 85.6 percent-demonstrating the regime's particular distaste for cases involving dissent.56 Expulsions for other sorts of misconduct experienced a similarly stark decline, including the loss of a party card. As noted in chapter 1, this offense had been seen as a sign of political weakness and a lack of vigilance in the 1930s before being viewed as a failure of discipline in the late Stalin years; under Khrushchev, party organs began to expel far fewer members for this offense. As table 12 shows, the number of expulsions dropped by more than 90 percent between 1953 and 1960 before rising by a small margin just before Khrushchev's overthrow. The Khrushchev-era vision of party discipline, in short, encompassed three important trends when it came to allegations of political disloyalty, vacillation, or unorthodoxy. First, the party leadership was determined to move beyond the repression of the Stalin years and the divisiveness of the Secret Speech by emphasizing a sweeping new program of political change, as exemplified by the new party program of 1961Y Both the all-union leadership and the leaders of local party organizations therefore had an incentive to downplay misconduct that cast doubt on what Shvernik termed "the unity of the ranks of our party:'

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TABLE 1 2 -Expulsions for the loss of Party Documents, 1954-1964 YEAR

Loss (%

OF DOCUMENTS

OF ALL EXPULSIONS)

1953

4,137 {5.4%)

1954

4,064 (3.2%)

1955

940 (2.1%)

1956

476 (1.1%)

1957

442 (1.0%)

1958

473 (0.9%)

1959

431 (0.8%)

1960

356 (0.9%)

1961

512 (1.3%)

1962

718 {1.6%)

1963

745 (1.1 %)

1964

1,264 (1.8%)

RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 8, l. 175; d. 9, II. 20, 69; d. 10, ll. 5, 65, 131; d. 11, ll. 5, 63, 124; d. 12, ll. 5, 54, 158,217.

Second, the leadership viewed coercive measures like expulsion as tools of the Stalin-era party and discouraged them, except as a last resort; this trend discouraged all expulsions (especially when the Twenty-Second Congress ruled that Communists could only be expelled by a two-thirds vote of their PPO), but the leadership's focus on the terror of the 1930s made it especially difficult to expel Communists guilty of political dissent. Third, and most prominently, the party leadership chose to highlight its new focus on "persuasion" rather than "coercion" by righting the wrongs of the past and rehabilitating thousands of innocent victims of the Stalinist terror. This theme-the subject of the remainder of the chapter-did not directly impact the lives of the majority of Communists who had joined the party in World War II or its aftermath, but it sent a powerful signal to society about the priorities and interests of the regime. From 1956 onward, the theory went, the Soviet regime would no longer tolerate the repressive methods of the past and would emphasize a vision of the ideal Communist as a selfless activist dedicated to the ideals of the regime.

The Restoration and Rehabilitation of Purge Victims in the Khrushchev Era

During the Khrushchev years, many discussions of the party and its internal life were dominated by a single word: rehabilitation. Even when Soviet leaders were slow to change their approach to present-day dissent, they were determined

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to transform the regime's attitude toward past political persecution; in fact, the release and legal rehabilitation of political prisoners was one of Khrushchev's most important legacies. Between 1954 and 1960, as Marc Elie has shown, the cases of more than 892,ooo victims of Stalin's Great Terror were reconsidered by the judicial system. In all, 731,970 Soviet citizens convicted of counterrevolutionary crimes under Stalin were cleared of wrongdoing through a process of legal rehabilitation, often posthumously. 58 Furthermore, many purge victims sought to supplement their legal vindication with restoration to the ranks of the party, beginning a series of appeals that played an important role in redefining the regime's vision of the ideal Communist. This vision emphasized the dedication and moral purity of party members, downplayed the role of coercion and violence in Soviet politics, and portrayed the party as a whole not simply as a victim of Stalin, but as a strong, active participant in Soviet life. 59 The concept at the heart of these discussions-rehabilitation-is difficult to define and could take several forms. 60 D. N. Ushakov's 1939 Interpretive Dictionary ofthe Russian Language gives the word "rehabilitation'' (reabilitatsiia) a dual meaning: "the restoration of the original, unsullied reputation, the refutation of accusations;' on the one hand, and the more legalistic "removal of accusations and full restoration to rights under law;' on the other. 6' Khrushchev-era sources often mirror these definitions, giving rehabilitation both legal and moral connotations in each of its different forms. 62 In particular, rehabilitation was not the same as simple release from captivity. Some purge victims were released from the Gulag without achieving rehabilitation of any kind and spent years or decades seeking legal vindication. 63 Others were luckier. Either before or after their release, these prisoners succeeded in convincing a court or a special commission to overturn their criminal sentences, a process often known as "legal rehabilitation:' That ended the process for many ex-prisoners, but once legal rehabilitation had been achieved, an ex-Communist who had been purged could send in an appeal (apelliatsiia) for restoration to the party, using the procedures that normally governed reinstatement; the family of a deceased purge victim could submit an application (zaiavlenie) for the posthumous rehabilitation of their relative. When a Communist had been cleared in court and restored to the party, he or she was declared to have been "fully rehabilitated" (pol'nost'iu reabilitirovan). The term "full rehabilitation;' in particular, suggested not only that a Communist's criminal convictions had been annulled, but that his or her reputation had been completely restored. 64 Party rehabilitation cases, then, were a subset of all legal and political cases involving the rehabilitation of purge victims, constituting a final step in the exoneration of Communist victims of Stalin; although they were far less common than legal rehabilitation cases, they played a crucial role both in restoring the reputation of their beneficiaries and in shaping the party's self-conception. The KPK began receiving applications for party rehabilitation in 1954 (when a mere 359 purge victims applied for reinstatement), 65 but as table 13 shows, the total soon skyrocketed. Although party reports differ on the exact totals, the

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KPK restored more than five thousand purge victims to the party between 1956 and 1960;66 still other Communists wrote to their obkom for reinstatement, leading to the restoration or posthumous rehabilitation of 30,964 purge victims by party organs all across the USSR by 1961. 67 Over time, however, the number of rehabilitation cases at the KPK dropped substantially, declining from 810 in 1957 to 195 in 1959-a sign both that some of the easiest cases had been decided quickly after Stalin's death and that the party's enthusiasm had cooled. Overall, the evidence suggests that after beginning slowly, the rehabilitation rate rose rapidly, reaching a higher success rate in posthumous rehabilitation cases than in appeals by living purge victims and slowing down by the late 1950s. Comrade Z, the former boss of a workshop at a magnesium combine, sent a typical appeal to the obkom in Molotov in 1956. Twenty years before, Comrade Z had been accused of close ties to several alleged counter-revolutionaries and of making a statement supporting Sergei Kirov's assassination; these charges led to his arrest, his expulsion, twelve years in a prison camp, and exile in Kazakhstan, but he finally returned to Molotov Province in 1954. On May 7, 1956, the presidium of the Molotov provincial court revoked his criminal conviction, citing a lack of evidence of a crime, and on June 15, the Leningrad municipal court declared him legally rehabilitated. 68 Comrade Z sent an application for reinstatement in the party to the KPK, which in turn referred the letter to the obkom in Molotov. The obkom then asked Comrade Z for more material: "We ask you to request and send to the party commission under the provincial committee of the CPSU testimonials [otzyvy] by several Communists who knew you before your arrest, and also the testimonials of Communists who know you from work since your release from imprisonment:' The signatures of these Communists, the letter continued, had to be certified by the raikom of the district where they worked. 69 In all, Comrade Z sent the obkom fifteen testimonials from fellow Communists, along with two references from local party organizations, and he traveled to an obkom hearing in Molotov to make his case. The obkom restored him to the party on November 28/0 Appeals like Comrade Z's looked routine, but their success depended on both the tenacity and the ingenuity of the accused: a Communist who sought rehabilitation and could send in the necessary materials was likely to succeed, but building a case could be difficult. Although Comrade Z succeeded in soliciting statements of support from fifteen fellow Communists, many purge victims had lost all touch with the people who knew them before their expulsion or felt uncomfortable turning to old friends for help/' Many Communists did not realize that they needed to seek legal rehabilitation before achieving reinstatement; others did not know how to compose an appeal or which party committee to turn to. Difficulties like these led Elena Stasovaan Old Bolshevik and former colleague of Lenin-to devote her retirement to helping purge victims navigate the complicated legal and political landscape surrounding rehabilitation/,

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TABLE 13-Rehabilitation Cases at the KPK, 1955-1961 YEAR

NUMBER OF

SuccESSFUL

REHABILITATION CASES

REHABILITATION CASES

(%OF ALL APPEALS)

(%OF ALL REHAB CASES)

1955

1,686 (14.34%)

1,588 (94.19%)

1956

2,633 (24.47%)

2,599 (98.71 %)

1957

810 (7.86%)

775 (95.67%)

1958 1959

195 (3.48%)

163 (83.59%)

1960

136 (2.40%)

117 (86.02%)

1961

53 (1.43%)

48 (90.57%)

RGANI f. 6, o. 6, dd. 1020, 1081, 1085,1167,1171, and 1174, I. 1 in each case

Unsurprisingly, then, the rehabilitation process was often biased toward former high-ranking party officials. For example, the KPK restored ninety-nine obkom, kraikom, or republican Central Committee secretaries; seventy-six gorkom or raikom secretaries; and ninety-three chairmen or deputy chairmen of oblispolkoms, kraiispolkoms, or republican councils of people's ministersroughly 5 percent of the Communists it rehabilitated/ 3 Khrushchev's Secret Speech had emphasized the number of executed delegates to 1934's so-called "Congress of Victors;' and party reports built on this theme, noting that of the seventy-one full members of the Central Committee in 1934, forty-four were arrested in the terror and forty-one had been fully rehabilitated by 1961. 74 Of the 30.964 Communists restored to the party across the USSR, 3,693 were former "leading workers" of the party and Komsomol, 4,148 were leading workers of Soviet organs, 6,165 were leading economic workers, and 4,394 commanders and political workers of the Soviet army/5 Their rehabilitation was a dramatic and important step in the repudiation of Stalinism, but both the party leadership's focus on "leading workers" and the need for detailed knowledge of the process ensured that purged officials were more likely than lower-ranking Communists to win rehabilitation. In the end, the party rehabilitated only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of Communists expelled during the Great Terror. On one level, this fact can be explained by the regime's larger interests in promoting rehabilitation, which were arguably intended as much to make a political point-emphasizing Khrushchev's break with Stalin-as they were to benefit the purge's victims/6 Scholars have long agreed that Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin was intended at least in part to solidify his position as Soviet leader; the dramatic public rehabilitation of delegates from the Seventeenth Party Congress, then,

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was as useful in achieving Khrushchev's immediate political goals as it was in ensuring the systematic rehabilitation of purge victims. The logistical challenges of rehabilitation also surely played a role, as did the fact that some purge victims did not want to be restored to the party.77 Nevertheless, rehabilitation's relatively short reach can be best explained by one crucial fact: rehabilitation was almost never initiated from above, forcing the vast majority of purge victims to initiate the processes of legal rehabilitation and party restoration themselves. Many purge victims faced more immediate needs-finding housing, medical care, and employment, for example, or even winning release from exile. Others needed an ally like Stasova to lead them through the rehabilitation process. In a perverse way, the decentralized nature of rehabilitation actually helped the party leadership to promote its vision of the party as a morally pure and dedicated organization, since the ex-Communists most likely to apply for rehabilitation were those who were most committed to its principles and most ostentatious in their political activism. Many party sources emphasized the activism of rehabilitated Communists, in fact, noting that "an absolute majority of those restored to the party are drawn to an active social-political and productive life"; many rehabilitated Communists became PPO secretaries and workplace activists, as proudly noted in a 1957 KPK report.7 8 Cases like this drove home the idea that a Communist was, above all else, a dedicated citizen activist and a participant in the building of socialism. Comrade T's 1956 appeal for reinstatement in the Communist Party was a perfect encapsulation of Khrushchev's vision of the party. Comrade T had been expelled as an enemy of the people in 1936, and although his criminal conviction was overturned in 1939, he was denied readmission to the party; he finally succeeded in winning readmission in 1956 with an appeal that beautifully illustrated Thaw-era views of the party. "I grew up in a tough working-class environment:' he began, adding that he was "brought up by the Komsomol and then the Communist Party;' which taught him "to work and to selflessly serve the people, the party, and the cause of Communism:' He concluded, For all the time after my expulsion from the party, I was never alienated from the life of the party. I constantly performed public work, systematically followed all the important decisions of the Communist Party, and tried to the best of my humble knowledge and experience to give every effort to complete my assigned task, as the party teaches and demands. Wherever I worked, I always set myself the task to work as conscientiously as a Communist should work. ... In my heart I was and remain a Communist/9 Most purge victims could not claim to have stayed in close touch with their party organization in the aftermath of expulsion-especially if they were sent to the Gulag. But applicants for rehabilitation wrote about their continued dedication to the party in their appeals, in their memoirs, and in letters to Elena Stasova.

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The widow of one purge victim explained that she had a "duty" to seek her late husband's rehabilitation. "Fedya was a good family man and loved his children;' N.D. Zlenko recalled fondly in her memoirs, "but he said to me many times that the party was in first place and his family in second:'so Similarly, Nadezhda Ioffe-daughter of the diplomat Adolf Ioffe-explained why she sought her husband's posthumous rehabilitation: "I wrote that it no longer made any difference to him, but his children remain, and I want the children to know that their father lived as a Communist and died as a Communist:'8' P. 0. Sagoian, whose memoir records his pride at being the first rehabilitated resident of the Siberian city ofNoril'sk, recalled a fellow purge victim, who "always remember[ed] with a sense of sorrow and patriotic pride the years he spent in this city, where his labor went into every building and every meter of the street:'82 Similarly, many purge victims remained dedicated to the party's principles and felt that they could help to redeem it if given the chance. M. T. Adeev, a purge victim rehabilitated in 1956, hinted at this theme when he titled his memoir Misfortune and a Bolshevik Conscience. Adeev recounted how he realized as a Gulag inmate that thousands of dedicated Communists had been unjustly punished; the "fate of the party began to worry him greatly;' and seeking personal rehabilitation became linked in his mind to the party's quest for redemption.83 Zakhar Ravdel', meanwhile, recalled that many fellow Gulag returnees were skeptical when he expressed his desire to rejoin the party: There were people who said to me, "Zakhar, give up this bother about restoration to the party. Are you really sure that this is the party in which you once enrolled? Look around at what they do. Where are the Leninist norms of party life? Where is the interparty democracy?" Ravdel' sought rehabilitation nonetheless. "I saw that my country, in spite of everything, was building socialism, that the basic ideas of the party remained in force;' he wrote, arguing that the party's Leninist ideals were worth fighting for. "All real Communists need to struggle for this within the party-not outside it. One could be a Communist without a party card, of course, but for me this was a question of principle-why wouldn't they restore me? On what basis?"84 Ravdel's rhetoric echoed the party line of the time almost perfectly: he argued both that the party needed to fight to reestablish the "Leninist norms" that had been corrupted by Stalin and that each individual Communist needed to participate actively in that struggle. But his remarks also touched on the theme of personal redemption, which helped to motivate many bids for rehabilitation. Adeev, for example, wrote of the "moral suffering" (moral'noe perezhivanie) he went through as a result of expulsion, recalling, "The thought never abandoned mehow could I restore my good name, my party status?"85 Although he was able to return to work as a schoolteacher even before 1956, he was denied a teaching award for decades because of the stain on his record, and he was reminded of

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his expulsion every time a student asked why he was not a Communist: "until [his rehabilitation];' he writes, "this was a very difficult question;' both because it was politically difficult to answer (since it would be considered "slander" to say that he was wrongfully expelled) and because it evoked painful memories. 56 A. F. Rabinovich recalled that his "feeling of isolation from people" never disappeared until after the Secret Speech, when his family returned to Moscow and won rehabilitation. 57 Other ex-Communists referred both to the need to recover their good name through rehabilitation and to the constant humiliations that resulted from expulsion years after they had been purged. Some Communists, of course, spoke of more tangible benefits from rehabilitation. The transcript of a 1955 hearing at the KPK made reference to the rehabilitated Communist's hope to receive a pension, for example;88 A. M. Zelenyi wrote that his raikom secretary offered to help him find work in Moscow, 89 while A. I. Perel'man recounted that her husband was given eight thousand rubles and was "summoned to the Central Committee [apparatus], talked cordially with them, and was asked what he needed. He said 'I don't need anything; although we were living together in one room:' 9 o Evgeniia Ginzburg, the eminent Gulag memoirist, recalled that the man who gave her a certificate announcing her legal rehabilitation also gave her the phone number of the KPK, urging her to seek party rehabilitation as well: I was so shocked by this unexpected turn of events, on my face was such confusion, that the colonel revived himself a little and looked at me, like at a living person. "Do you really not want party rehabilitation?" "I ... I. . :'

I simply could not believe my ears. They were proposing that I, a pariah yesterday, return to the ranks of the ruling party. I did not know what to say. 9 ' The man went on to tell Ginzburg that every time she filled out a questionnaire while being registered for a new job, she would need to write that she had been "expelled for counter-revolutionary Trotskyist terrorist activity" unless she had been rehabilitated; that advice, and the fact that the colonel "talk[ed to her]like to one of his own'' (po-svoiski), made a big impression on Ginzburg. 92 Ultimately, of course, it is impossible to know the motivations behind purge victims' appeals for rehabilitation. 93 In the same way that many Communists sought party membership in the hope of receiving material benefits while claiming to be dedicated to its principles, some purge victims undoubtedly toed the party line in public while remaining most interested in a less idealistic goal; some ex-Communists even acted out of the fear that refusing to rejoin the party would be seen as an anti-regime act. 94 But many purge victims sought party rehabilitation out of genuine dedication to the principles of the party or out of the belief that their own personal vindication was linked to the party's

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redemption. Elena Stasova herself only assisted purge victims with legal rehabilitation if they agreed to seek party rehabilitation as well95 -a belief based in part on her fear that many young Communists were overly careerist and needed to be reminded of the activism and dedication of the Old Bolsheviks. 96 If nothing else, Khrushchev's vision of party renewal was bolstered by the spectacle of thousands of purge victims asking for rehabilitation, proclaiming their absolute dedication to the party, and promising to devote themselves to Leninist activism. Party rehabilitation, in short, could make a dramatic difference in the lives of purge victims, while serving the larger political goals of the Khrushchev-era regime.

The Limits of Rehabilitation Taken as a whole, then, the rehabilitation drive represented a dramatic repudiation of the Stalinist terror. Nevertheless, although more than 90 percent of the purge victims who appealed their expulsion to the KPK succeeded in winning restoration to the party's ranks, a substantial fraction of purge victims were denied party rehabilitation. Some purge victims failed to regain their party membership because they had committed moral infractions in the years after their expulsion. 97 More often, ex-Communists seeking rehabilitation fell victim to one of two pitfalls. The party's approach to rehabilitation became more skeptical by the late 1950s, as political unrest in the Eastern Bloc raised worries about the elite's loyalty and as some Soviet leaders grew concerned that de-Stalinization was going too far. In 1957, for instance, a KPK report noted that not all of those who were rehabilitated by judicial organs and restored to the party conduct themselves correctly. There have been many examples when different people, after their restoration to the CPSU, began to express their anti-party views. This happened in particular in the period of the famous events in Poland and Hungary. 98 Moreover, even before the crackdowns in Budapest and Warsaw, many party organizations began to argue that an ex-Communist could not receive party rehabilitation if he or she had broken with the party's principles in the 1930Seven if that purge victim had been cleared of criminal wrongdoing. In this view-closely tied to the idea that a Communist needed to fight enthusiastically for the party's program-a Communist who had endorsed the opposition or denounced collectivization could not rejoin the party, even if he or she had been legally rehabilitated. The party expressed its logic behind denying rehabilitation to purge victims on several occasions. In 1959, for instance, the obkom in Kyiv announced that it had rejected 21.5 percent of appeals by legally rehabilitated purge victims,

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explaining, "We refused to restore to the party people who were in various anti-Leninist groups doing harm to the party, and people brought to party responsibility for abuse of their position or amoral acts without justifying themselves in practical work, even when they had been rehabilitated by legal organs:' 99 The KPK articulated a variant on this theme in a report to the party's Twenty-Second Congress in 1961: During the review of cases it sometimes became clear that among those who had been rehabilitated in court and who sent statements about their restoration to the CPSU were people who, in the period of bitter struggle with the Trotskyists, the Zinovievites, and the right oppositionists, actively spoke out against the party in defense of the opposition. There was no basis for bringing these people to criminal responsibility, but they were expelled from the party correctly in their time. 100 This explanation accounted for the most frequent reason for denying purge victims readmission to the party: although they had been legally rehabilitated, they were not allowed back into the party because they had genuinely supported the opposition and rejected the Stalinist line. After all, as many scholars have noted, Khrushchev and his allies used the rehabilitation drive to denounce the Great Terror-not to repudiate all of Stalinism. Khrushchev's main targets were the excesses of 1937-1938 and the NKVD of Nikolai Ezhov and Lavrentii Beria, not the struggle with the opposition or the collectivization drive. Many rulings rejecting a purge victim's rehabilitation were therefore based on a finding that the Communist in question had been punished by the security organs and expelled from the party for different reasons. In April1957, the KPK considered a petition for the posthumous rehabilitation of Comrade X, who had been first imprisoned and then executed for membership in a counterrevolutionary group; he had been legally rehabilitated in 1956. Nevertheless, the KPK rejected Comrade X's party rehabilitation, finding that although he had been wrongfully arrested as a terrorist, he had been properly expelled from the party for refusing to repudiate his endorsement of the Trotskyist-Zinovievite opposition. Similarly, Kalinin's obkom rejected the party rehabilitation of a former newspaper editor in 1959. Comrade Y was said to have displayed "political wavering and unsteadiness" and to have expressed "disagreement with the party line on an array of questions of socialist construction'' during the 1930s. In 1931, for example, he had decried the growth of the army and denounced the rise of "red imperialism:' When he was sent to local kolkhozy to help with the harvest, he "oriented the leadership of the kolkhoz and the party organization'' toward non-fulfillment of the plan. In February 1934, an NKVD troika (or three-member commission) sentenced him to five years in the Gulag for "anti-Soviet agitation and the creation of a counter-revolutionary organization;' a sentence that was thrown out in 1959. Nevertheless, party investigators found that Comrade Y 10 '

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had written a 1934 petition to the Central Committee, declaring that he had disagreed with the party's general line since 1930, denouncing industrialization and collectivization, and endorsing the views of the Right Opposition. Given his record of opposition and his twenty-seven-year absence from the party, the obkom ruled that he had been correctly expelled.'02 Comrade Y, then, was expelled because he had opposed collectivization-or, in other words, because he had broken with Stalinism too soon and for the wrong reasons. Other purge victims were denied rehabilitation on the same grounds. In 1959, the obkom in Kalinin denied the appeal of a man who had been exiled to the Krasnoiarsk Territory from 1935 to 1946 for involvement in a counter-revolutionary Zinovievite group; even though he was legally rehabilitated, the obkom found that he had voted against a 1926 resolution endorsing the decisions of the Fourteenth Party Congress, voted in favor of Zinoviev at a meeting of the Leningrad provincial party conference, and been exiled from Leningrad as an oppositionist. The party had no place for former supporters of Grigorii Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky in its ranks, the obkom declared.'03 In a 1955 case, the KPK debated the fate of a former teacher of Marxism-Leninism who had been arrested in 1935 for membership in a counter-revolutionary group and expelled from the party because of opposition ties. (He was accused of criminal links to several convicted Zinovievites, including the editor of the journal Zvezda; he had also used a book by Zinoviev in his work and espoused a Zinovievite view on the question of "socialism in one country:') Twenty years later, Comrade O's conviction was overturned, but the procuracy noted that he had indeed been a friend of the Zvezda editor. Comrade 0 appealed twice to the KPK (and once to the obkom in Leningrad, which turned down his appeal), ultimately telling KPK members that "I ask you to forgive me this mistake, which I made in the period of the Fourteenth Party Congress. I did not understand then the treacherous character of the Zinovievite opposition, I never wavered on substance:' The KPK eventually ruled that Comrade 0 could be restored to the party with a petition from his PPO, his raikom, the Leningrad gorkom, and the Leningrad obkom-as generous a decision as an active former oppositionist was likely to get. !04 Purge victims could also be denied rehabilitation because of their involvement in the excesses of the Stalinist regime. In fact, party discipline cases of the 1950s offer three final lessons about the party's approach to rehabilitation. The first lesson can be seen in a 1957 case from Kalinin Province: NKVD officials who had participated in the terror could rarely regain their party membership, even when they had been cleared of the charges that led to their purging. Comrade H, who had been a high-ranking official in Kuibyshev's provincial NKVD in the 1930s, had been condemned to five years in the Gulag for "participation in an anti-Soviet conspiracy" in 1939; he at first confessed that the local NKVD chiefhad recruited him to a rightist-Trotskyist organization and that he, in turn, had recruited other NKVD workers to the plot, before retracting his confession

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and stating that he had been tortured into confessing. Two decades later, a military prosecutor found that the 1939 charges against him were completely unfounded, but added that Comrade H had "actively taken part" in the arrest of innocent people. His involvement in the Stalinist "violation of socialist legality;' the obkom found, overshadowed his good work record and the baselessness of the original charges against him.' 05 A second reason for the rejection of appeals by purge victims is exemplified by a 1956 case from Molotov: even when the original charges against a Communist had been overturned, he or she might not be restored if accused of wrongfully implicating other innocent Communists through "slander" (kleveta). Comrade F had been purged in 1936 for a lack of vigilance toward his Trotskyist brother and was imprisoned in February 1938; the following month, he confessed his participation in a rightist-Trotskyist organization in a letter to a people's commissar and named more than forty other members, leading to the arrest of dozens of people. His Trotskyist group was soon found to be a complete fabrication, however, and he was convicted of slander and "provocative testimony" in November 1939. When he was released from the Gulag in 1955, he applied for reinstatement in the party, but both the courts and the obkom rejected his claim that he had committed slander only under torture. Even though he had been cleared of the 1936 charges against him, Comrade F could not rejoin the party. 106 A third lesson can be drawn from the 1956 case of a Moscow journalist: past involvement in NKVD circles could stand in the way of restored party membership. Comrade B was a prominent periodical editor when her husband (an NKVD official) was arrested in 1937. Comrade B herself was soon accused of two offenses: a lack of vigilance toward her husband and a refusal to disassociate herself from him. The raikom's decision expelling her added a new charge-"moving in the society of the enemy of the people [Genrikh] Iagoda, she did not signal the party about the everyday degeneracy and political moods of this milieu:' Comrade B was sentenced to eight years in the Gulag in 1938 and remained there until the 1950s; in 1955, however, the military collegium of the Supreme Court threw out all the charges against her. Even so, the military procuracy announced that her husband had been "a participant in an anti-Soviet conspiratorial organization headed by Iagoda, and was informed by Iagoda about the participants in the murder of Sergei M. Kirov:' The KPK report describing Comrade B's case urged that she be restored to the party following her legal rehabilitation, but the full KPK found that she had no place in the party. 107

Ending the Postwar Purge

The rehabilitation of the Great Terror's victims was the most important way in which de-Stalinization affected the party discipline system, but many of the

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same trends were at play in a parallel development: the party's repudiation of the postwar purge ofPOWs and Communists who had lived on occupied territory (discussed in chapter 2). This campaign often resembled the rehabilitation drive. In a situation similar to the legal rehabilitation of the Great Terror's victims, a series of Khrushchev-era state decrees began to liberalize the legal status of POWs and collaborators-a process that culminated in a commission on the persecution of POWs headed by Field Marshal Georgii Zhukov and a September 1956 Central Committee resolution freeing all remaining POWs from prison or exile. 108 Like Great Terror victims, victims of the postwar purge began appealing for reinstatement in the party as early as 1954, and by the late 1950s, the leadership had repudiated the expulsion of thousands of innocent Communists for their supposedly "unworthy" wartime behavior. As a 1961 KPK report declared, "the very fact of being in captivity or on occupied territory, regardless of conditions and without considering the behavior of the Communist, was completely groundlessly considered a misdeed incompatible with party membership"; 109 officials now emphasized that appeals by expelled Communists would succeed, unless their accusers could provide proof of concrete wrongdoing greater than simple passivity. Nevertheless, as dramatic as this change could be in improving the lives of the purge's victims, the party's efforts were often stymied by the continuing tensions associated with the war. Table 14 highlights the KPK's changing attitude toward Communists accused of unworthy wartime conduct: as late as 1953, the committee rejected 96 percent of all appeals by ex-POWs and Communists who had lived on occupied territory, but between 1955 and 1961, it overturned the expulsion of 54.35 percent of the postwar purge victims whose cases it heard. 110 Party committees in the provinces, meanwhile, restored even more Communists to the party. Between February 1956 and June 1961, the KPK and provincial party organs reviewed 24,038 appeals by former POWs and Communists who had lived on occupied territory; they restored 16,223 of those ex-Communists to the party (67-49 percent).m The KPK's 1961 report declared that members expelled for wartime misdeeds would be denied readmission "only in those cases where examples of the unworthy conduct of the appellant are really confirmed by investigation'' -say, when a Communist enrolled in the Nazis' so-called "national legions" or joined German singing ensembles and wrote patriotic Nazi songs.' The party's approach was not quite as sweeping as it was in cases concerning the terror of the 1930s-postwar purge victims could not be rehabilitated posthumously, and the term "rehabilitation'' was conspicuously absent from party discourse. Moreover, the party's declining enthusiasm for the rehabilitation of Great Terror victims in the late 1950s was paralleled by an even greater decline in the restoration of postwar purge victims: from 1959 onward, the KPK rejected a majority of the appeals by "unworthy" Communists that came before it. In part as a result, the party's repudiation of the postwar purge was always more superficial than its repudiation of the terror of the 1930S. 113 Between February 12

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1956 and December 1960, the KPK reviewed 1,771 cases of unworthy conduct on occupied territory or in captivity, restoring 1,112 Communists to the party (64.95 percent); it reviewed 3,792 appeals for the rehabilitation of Great Terror victims, rehabilitating 94.86 percent of them. 114 The best-case scenario facing victims of the postwar purge was represented by the 1957 case of a factory worker from Molotov Province who had been expelled as an ex-POW and later spent one year, nine months, and three days on occupied territory. The workers in the factory were nearly uniform in their praise of Comrade V, who had never been accused of a concrete anti-Soviet act; the factory's party assembly voted to overturn his expulsion by a vote of 131 to 1. The lone dissenter claimed that Comrade V had "acted badly" and "shown a lack of firmness" when he destroyed his party card on the field of battle, but the next speaker disputed this claim, arguing (rather misleadingly) that the regime had ordered its members to destroy their party documents so they would not fall into enemy hands. The obkom endorsed Comrade V's appeal and even praised him for his military reference from 1945, which singled him out for bravery. 115 Other cases could be far messier, even when they resulted in reinstatement. In November 1957, the KPK reviewed the appeal of Comrade E, who had left a high-ranking position at the foreign trade commissariat in 1941 to join the people's militia (narodnoe opolchenie); after fighting the Germans in several battles, he was captured, interrogated by the Gestapo, and forced to work as the director of a factory that produced machinery for the German army. 116 Comrade E was sentenced to ten years in the Gulag by a postwar military tribunal, partly on the basis of a 1945 confession that (he said) had been coerced. Comrade E succeeded in winning legal rehabilitation in 1956, when the confession was thrown out and favorable testimonials from fellow POWs were taken into account, but the party was less inclined to exonerate him. His PPO endorsed a petition to restore him to the party, but his raikom and the Moscow gorkom disagreed. The KPK finally voted to restore Comrade E to the party after he twice met with one of its members to plead his case-a sign that even a POW who worked for the Germans might win reinstatement, but that many Communists remained suspicious of former prisoners. Many postwar purge victims were less fortunate when they sought to regain their party membership. Communists who had concealed their POW status or their time spent on occupied territory when they joined the party were still subject to expulsion during the Thaw, even when they had resisted the Germans!' 7 Moreover, postwar purge cases differed from the cases of the 1930s in one crucial respect: although the Great Terror was driven by hysteria against nonexistent "enemies of the people;' some Communists really had compromised themselves in the war. In 1954, for example, Kalinin's obkom rejected the petition of a history teacher who had convinced his PPO and raikom to support his reinstatement. Although he correctly pointed out that he had destroyed his party card only at the moment of capture, new allegations had emerged: that he had worked in the

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TABLE 14-Appeals to the KPK by Communists Expelled for "Unworthy Conduct in Captivity and on Occupied Territory, Concealment of These Facts," 1953-1961 YEAR

TOTAL APPEALS

RESTORED COMMUNISTS

1953

545

(%)

17 (3.12%)

1954

596

110 (18.46%)

1955

478

224 (46.86%)

1956*

559

446 (79.79%)

1956**

207

116 (56.04%)

1957

430

243 (56.51%)

1959

461

151 (32.75%)

1960

173

80 (46.24%)

1961

117

58 (49.57%)

1958

*Regular appeals. **Appeals to 21st party congress. Source: RGANif. 6, o. 6, dd. 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 1017, 1020, 1081, 1082, 1085, 1167, 1171, and 1174, I. 1 (in each case). The fond includes no data for 1958; the 1961 data are labeled "unworthy conduct in captivity" but probably also include occupation cases.

camp as a policeman and barracks commandant, mistreating his fellow POWs and displaying a pro-fascist newspaper in the barracks.''8 In November 1961, Kalinin's obkom rejected the appeal of Comrade U, a prisoner-turned-forester accused of collaboration: in 1956, a military tribunal had thrown out his convictions for voluntarily handing himself over to the Germans, spreading anti-Soviet propaganda among POWs, and collaborating with German scouts, but left in force a conviction for treason, since he had renounced his Soviet citizenship and left captivity to work for the Nazis.n9 The KPK, finally, rejected the April196o appeal of a Communist from Orel when one of its investigators noted that he had informed the Germans about the position of Soviet troops.' 20 Table 14 reveals another striking fact: although the KPK overturned the expulsion of a majority of the postwar purge victims who appealed to it in 1957, it heard fewer appeals by ex-POWs and residents of occupied territory that year than at any time since the war. The daunting paperwork required by the party undoubtedly discouraged many ex-Communists from seeking reinstatement, since POWs still needed to provide testimonials about the circumstances surrounding their capture; many former Communists presumably faced discrimination and suspicion when they sought to gather references about their work. One KPK report describes the angry reaction of the Communists at a Ukrainian factory when the obkom voted to reinstate an ex-POW who had destroyed his party card, was captured by the Nazis, and lived "passively" on occupied 121

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territory after his wife convinced the Germans to release him.m Many citizens, it seems, were far more suspicious of ex-POWs and of citizens who had lived on German -occupied soil than they were of the victims of the Ezhovshchina. These attitudes led to some differences in how ex-POWs and former residents of occupied soil were treated by their comrades and by local party organizations. Former prisoners, it seems, were more likely to seek readmission to the party than Communists who had lived on occupied territory, and more likely to be reinstated if they did appeal. In many Ukrainian provinces, for example, the party heard more appeals from ex-POWs than from Communists who had lived under German rule, even though the latter were substantially more numerous. In 1956 and the first four months of 1957, for example, the party committee in Voroshylovhrad heard 67 appeals by Communists who had lived on occupied territory (restoring 53, or 79 percent) and 92 by ex-POWs (restoring 87, or 94-5 percent). 123 In 1957, the party commission in Dnipropetrovs'k heard the cases of 272 ex-POWs (restoring 189, or 69 percent), 66 Communists who stayed behind (restoring 33, or 50 percent), and 126 Great Terror victims (restoring 111, or 88 percent).' 24 In the first half of 1957, finally, the party collegium in Stalino Province (the Ukrainian oblast with the highest number of Communists who had lived on occupied territory) heard 116 cases of ex-POWs (restoring 86 of them, or 74 percent) and just 16 cases from occupied territory (restoring only hal£). 125 At a time when Soviet popular culture had begun to document the plight of POW s in films like Grigorii Chukhrai's Clear Skies, POWs were viewed more sympathetically than residents of German -controlled soil. 126 In short, Communists accused of"unworthy conduct on occupied territory" were treated more leniently than ever before, but they still faced the suspicion of their comrades. The Communists most likely to win readmission were those whose cases had been dose calls in the 1940s. In October 1956, for example, the KPK voted to restore a Kursk man who had been expelled by his obkom in 1947-even though his raikom had voted to limit his punishment to a reprimand in 1943, noting that he had been hospitalized with gangrene during the invasion, had preserved his party card, and had spread Soviet propaganda dropped into the city by airplane.'27 Many Communists were less fortunate. In January 1956, the KPK rejected the appeal of a Communist expelled for concealing his stay on occupied territory and failing to join the partisans. He pointed out that he had preserved his party card and his weapon, had done nothing to help the Germans, and had been forced to go help his family on a nearby homestead, but neither his kraikom nor the KPK would approve his reinstatement, since a control commission had characterized his actions as "desertion" years before. 128 A woman from the Krasnodar Territory, finally, convinced the KPK to restore her to the party in 1960, but only after five previous appeals to Moscow and repeated rejections by her raikom and kraikom. Comrade G had been expelled in 1944 for offenses ranging from passivity and the failure to evacuate to home-brewing and speculation under German rule, but KPK investigators could find "no compromising materials of

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any kind on [Comrade G] at either the Iaroslavskii raikom or the Krasnodar branch of the KGB" other than the vague testimony oflocal residents. Nevertheless, most of the people who thought she had done something wrong admitted that they knew nothing about the case themselves and had just heard about it from their wives. Comrade G was finally restored to the party in July 1960, but her long struggle highlighted the many challenges facing the victims of the postwar purge. 129 The main change in party discourse, then, was that the regime had abandoned the presumption of guilt facing Communists accused of wartime wrongdoing. In the absence of other evidence, party organs no longer assumed that accused Communists had willingly surrendered to the Germans or had remained on occupied territory of their own accord. Party officials no longer rejected the testimonials of other former POWs out of hand. Even some Communists who arguably had compromised themselves were restored to the party, like one man who used a favorable reference from work to convince the KPK to restore him, even though he admitted to having worked for the Germans and destroying his party card.'30 When Communists could not provide the documentation they needed, finally, they were often allowed to join the party again if they began the admissions process anew.'3' Nevertheless, many of the postwar purge's victims failed to apply for reinstatement or were confronted with the suspicion and indifference of their former comrades. The party had repudiated its postwar purge as a manifestation of Stalin's personality cult, but more than a decade of harsh rhetoric and official mythmaking could not be discarded so easily. World War II and many of its victims within the party had both been left behind.

Punishing the Perpetrators

The de-Stalinization of the party discipline system had one final element: the expulsion of Communists implicated in the terror of the 1930s. The campaign against Stalinist officials guilty of "violating socialist legality" was never as far-reaching as the push for rehabilitation, however, and its impact was limited by its division into two distinct phases. First, beginning soon after Stalin's death, the country's new leadership cracked down on a small group of powerful officials, most of whom had served in the secret police; this campaign was closely associated with the succession struggle and resulted in the arrest, conviction, expulsion from the party, and occasionally even the execution of a clique of powerful MVD officials.'32 The process then entered a second phase, in which a seemingly random assortment of officials implicated in the terror lost their party membership but usually escaped prosecution. Neither of these campaigns went as far as the party's rhetoric suggested, but together they represented a forceful repudiation of the violence and coercion of the Stalin era.

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Most allegations of purge-era wrongdoing concerned "the violation of socialist legality;' a charge that (as Miriam Dobson has noted) became one of the touchstones of the early Khrushchev years. 133 As previous scholars have shown, Lavrentii Beria-the head of the secret police-was the first figure to be targeted in this way; a strong contender for power because of his position as interior minister, Beria was arrested at a meeting of the presidium on June 26, 1953, and was executed the following December on charges that included treason and counter-revolution. Beria's downfall included dramatic revelations about the women he had allegedly summoned to his home and raped after he saw them on night-time drives through Moscow. Ironically, Beria's downfall combined Stalinist allegations that he was an "enemy of the people" with charges that by acting as the consummate Stalinist, he had "violated socialist legalitY:''34 From then until1961, the country's new rulers were harshly critical of the secret police, portraying it as the source of many of the country's Stalin-era problems.'35 Although tens of thousands of officials in the new KGB lost their jobs due to their alleged political unreliability, a smaller number of officersmany of them high-ranking officials-were expelled from the party for violating socialist legality. In fact, the KPK itself expelled 347 Stalin-era officials for this crime between 1956 and 1961, including ten ministers or deputy ministers of internal affairs at the all-union or republican levels, seventy-seven high-ranking NKVD officials from the all-union or oblastlkrai levels, and seventy-two heads of city or district NKVD departments. Beria's long-time deputy, S. N. Kruglov, was said to have "revealed himself as a person personally dedicated to Beria'' and to have been involved in the deportation of the Chechens to Central Asia, while N. I. Neiman (another high-ranking official) personally "falsified an array of cases against leading party and Soviet workers;' including the heads of the Kazakh and Azerbaijani parties.'36 In fact, party officials took particular pains to emphasize the secret police's persecution of Communists, noting that "in many cases, decisions on expulsion from the party were carried out on the basis of lists of arrestees sent by the NKVD:'137 The targets of the campaign for "socialist legality" centered on just a few prominent groups, showing the limited nature of the campaign. In general, official rhetoric treated "the party" as a victim, not a perpetrator, of the purgesemphasizing that the events of the 1930s were a "violation of the norms of party life" and drawing attention to the thousands of party members who fell victim to Stalin's crimes.'38 In most accounts, officials of the NKVD and other secret police institutions took second place only to Stalin himself as the chief perpetrators of the purge; party leaders also targeted a handful of other officials, who were portrayed as "enemies of the people" who "propagated morals [nravy] alien to the party" throughout the country. M. D. Bagirov, for example, was an infamous Stalin crony who led the Azerbaijani party and was expelled from the party under Khrushchev for his role in the purges. In turn, several high-ranking officials from Azerbaijan were expelled for their ties to Bagirov, including M. T.

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Iakuvov, a former first secretary of the republic's party, and T. Kuliev, a former chairman of the republic's Council of Ministers. Both men were accused of serving on a troika that sentenced large numbers of innocent people to death, and Kuliev was even charged with helping to organize a Bagirov museum. 139 The campaign for socialist legality, then, began before the rehabilitation drive and continued throughout the Khrushchev era, but was less far-reaching than the party's efforts to bring purge victims back into the party. Many early cases focused not on the purges themselves, but on the Leningrad Affair of the late 1940s, and the drive to punish the perpetrators of the purges gained momentum in February 1956 with Khrushchev's Secret Speech. Between February 1956 and June 1961, the KPK reviewed the cases of 387 Communists "guilty of the egregious violation of socialist legality" and expelled 347, while lower-level party organs expelled hundreds more. 140 The campaign to hold Stalinist officials responsible for the repression of the 1930s was far from comprehensive, however. In many instances, the KPK expelled multiple officials from one province and none from others-of the sixty-eight MVD officials expelled by the committee in 1956 and 1957, six (nearly 10 percent) came from Khabarovsk, two from North Ossetia, and three from Ivanovo, for example/4 ' The party leadership, in short, sent a message to the secret police and the political establishment that it had repudiated the crimes of Stalin, while threatening the position of only a fraction of the men who had enabled the terror. There were several obstacles to a more comprehensive attempt at achieving justice. First, Khrushchev seems to have intentionally limited the scope of the campaign against the purge's perpetrators because he did not want it to swerve out of control or damage his credibility; Olga Shatunovskaia, a former Gulag prisoner who became a KPK member in the 1950s, even recalled a 1962 conversation in which Khrushchev urged her not to publish materials she had found on the cases ofBukharin and other leaders, announcing, "If we publish this now, it will discredit us:' 142 Second, the de-Stalinization efforts of Khrushchev and his allies were always connected with an instrumental goal: winning the succession struggle. Once that goal had been achieved, there was less need to continue the campaign. Third, the rules of Khrushchev-era politics prevented most other actors from taking action against the perpetrators of the purges. Purge victims themselves never had the opportunity to file a formal complaint, and prosecutors lost the power to prosecute most Stalin-era criminals in the late 1950s, when legal reforms established a new statute of limitations on past offenses. 143 On the most fundamental level, the campaign against "violators of socialist legality" did not target more offenders because Khrushchev and his allies wanted to limit their campaign to the investigation of the NKVD and of a few other bad apples and "enemies of the people" -not to destabilize the system bequeathed to them by Stalin. This conflict was evident in nearly every party hearing on the issue. Most accused officials portrayed themselves as cogs in a system, playing by a rulebook that could have come straight out of Hannah

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Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: they emphasized that they were just following orders and that other people-or the system as a whole-were to blame. In 1959, for example, the obkom in Chita heard a case involving a Communist accused of having used "physical and moral torture" to force prisoners to sign confessions of belonging to a counter-revolutionary organization back in 1938. Comrade D denied having beaten any prisoners and admitted only to using "the conveyor system'' in interrogations, explaining that he "was still a young party member then and was blindly following the instructions of his bosses:' In one sentence, he combined a standard Communist excuse about wrongdoing (that he was still young) with an explanation reminiscent of Arendt's invocation of the banality of evil. The KPK expelled him nonetheless.'44 A similar dynamic was at play in other "socialist legality" cases, even those involving high-ranking officials. Consider the following exchange from a KPK hearing discussing the fate of N. D. Gorlinskii, the deputy head of Ukraine's NKVD in 1937-1938: Comrade Luk'ianov: In what are you guilty? Comrade Gorlinskii: In the fact that I did not free Oreshko in a timely way, and I am guilty in the fact that I signed the resolution on his arrest. Comrade Tikunov: What do you mean, you signed it? You were deciding the fate of a person. Comrade Gorlinskii: I confirmed the arrest, the Central Committee sanctioned the arrest.'4s Gorlinskii was too high-ranking an official to plausibly blame his superiors for his crimes, but his strategy was unconvincing for another reason as well: he deviated from the script of Khrushchev-era politics by blaming the Ukrainian Central Committee (rather than the NKVD) for the arrest of an innocent party member. Other officials, like 1.1. Didiukov (the head ofBeria's security detail) also sought to deflect blame for their crimes. Both the KGB party organization and the Moscow obkom voted to expel Didiukov from the party; as a KPK report noted, "Working for the personal security of the enemy of the people Beria, Didiukov fulfilled [Beria's] criminal instructions, and the instructions of the head of security Sarkisov and his deputy Nadaraia, to establish the names and addresses of women Beria liked, whom he brought to [Beria] at his dacha by means of deceit, threats, and provocation:''46 In his appeal to the KPK, however, Didiukov did everything possible to downplay his ties to Beria and to state illegality. "I served in Georgia during the mobilization and worked in the diplomatic corps;' he said, "and then they transferred me to Moscow, called me in, and said 'You're going to work for Beria:" (Didiukov never wanted to work for Beria, he suggested-he was summoned by his bosses and ordered to do so!) When asked about the specific allegations against him, he replied:

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Once Nadaraia took me from my post and said, "Come with me:' I had an address, I called a person, and what he wanted with that person did not concernme. I did not fulfill any of the orders of the enemy of the people Beria. I did not bring any women to Beria. I was a rank-and-file worker, but what happened in his house, I do not know.' 47 Didiukov, in short, denied personal wrongdoing and claimed to be following orders from above. To his accusers, however, this was not convincing: he had participated in the crimes of a corrupt NKVD and of "enemies of the people" like Beria and Bagirov. Most of the Communists expelled from the party for participation in the purges were former NKVD officials accused of torture and related crimes, but on rare occasions, the party cracked down on men and women whose fabricated denunciations had led to the repression of their innocent peers. In June 1956, for example, the KPK considered the case of Olga Mishakova, who (a report declared) "was involved for an extended period in the slander of party and Komsomol officials who were not guilty of anything:' Mishakova was an instructor at the Komsomol's Central Committee in 1937, when she committed two related offenses: delivering "provocative" speeches stirring up denunciations and falsely accusing members of the all-union Komsomol's Central Committee of being enemies of the people. Many of them-including Aleksandr Kosarev, the head of the Komsomol-were then arrested and executed, before being rehabilitated under Khrushchev. Mishakova was presumably not the only party member expelled under Khrushchev for purge-era "slander;' but her case seems exceptional: her denunciation of Kosarev was sent directly to Stalin and was accepted "on faith:'' 48 (Khrushchev refers to Mishakova in his memoirs as "unquestionably a person with a psychological defect, even though she might have been an honest person:')'49 Given the massive number of Soviet citizens who denounced friends or colleagues during the purges and never faced any consequences for their crimes, it seems likely that Mishakova was only disciplined because of the prominence of her victims and the great volume of her baseless accusations. Under what circumstances could an accused Communist fend off charges of involvement in the purges? A handful of Communists managed to convince the KPK to let them off with a censure for violating socialist legality, and their cases had several common elements. First, most of the accused-like Comrade S, a procuracy official from Smolensk-confessed that they had helped persecute innocent people. These officials sometimes pleaded inexperience or blamed their superiors in the NKVD, but they also emphasized their relatively small role in the terror. In nearly every case, they were guilty of conducting a "superficial" investigation of a purge victim's case, but they were not accused of using torture to win a death sentence. Comrade S, for example, failed to seek out three

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witnesses requested by a purge victim but did not use "physical means" to get a confession.'50 Another NKVD official, though accused of hitting a prisoner who complained that other secret police officers had tried to beat him into giving a confession, was primarily accused of seeking to speed up the process, not of faking documents or torturing innocent people;'5' he too pointed out his lack of experience in the secret police and pointed the finger at his superiors. If these cases are any indication, the Communists most likely to fend off charges of "violating socialist legality" for their actions during the purges were relatively low-ranking officials who admitted wrongdoing, denounced the NKVD for its participation in the terror, emphasized their lack of experience, and plausibly maintained that they were innocent of using torture to solicit confessions. In short, the party's investigation of NKVD officials accused of "violating socialist legality" followed a pattern that defined the Khrushchev-era regime's approach to political misconduct by Communists. Party leaders denounced the crimes of Stalin and made a show of punishing certain high -level offenders from the 1930s, but both the rehabilitation drive and the campaign to punish purge-era wrongdoers were pursued inconsistently and with mixed results; certain aspects of the Stalinist mindset remained, including an early focus on "enemies of the people" and a willingness to punish Communists who attacked Khrushchev's personality cult rather than Stalin's. The party's success in rehabilitating thousands of purge victims should not be minimized, but none of the campaigns at the heart of Khrushchev's efforts to de-Stalinize the party discipline system were fully successful. Dramatic as they often were, Khrushchev's efforts to repudiate Stalin and his crimes were more noteworthy for changing the party's rhetoric and atmosphere than they were in changing the internal dynamics of the party discipline system.

CHAPTER FOUR

Policing the Party Corruption, Administrative Misconduct, and Control from Above in Postwar Party Discipline

F

R o M T H E F 1 R s T D A Y s of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party assigned party committees and rank-and-file Communists a watchdog role in society, expecting them to supervise the work of economic enterprises and government offices, to root out corruption, and to ensure the loyalty and honesty of Soviet officials and administrators.' Party organs therefore played a complex role in the investigation of misconduct, and few issues better exemplified the complexities and ambiguities that defined party discipline than the struggle with corruption and administrative wrongdoing. When party organs discussed their members' misconduct, for instance, they rarely referred to the problem of "corruption" (korruptsiia); that term was most often used for self-interested behavior in capitalist societies and frequently took on connotations of moral degeneration! Instead, party organs pursued a variety of more specific offenses, including embezzlement (prisvoenie ), bribery (vziatochnichestvo), waste or swindling (rastrata), and "the abuse of a service position" (zloupotreblenie sluzhebnym polozheniem). These offenses could be committed by a wide variety of wrongdoers, from high-level officials to everyday citizens, and often combined improvidence and corruption in unexpected ways. 3 Several generations of historians and economists have recognized the unusually rich history of corruption and administrative wrongdoing within the USSR. Scholars such as Joseph Berliner, Alena Ledeneva, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Julie Hessler have shown that the Soviet economy had a large sector that was both informal and borderline illegal; economic enterprises and individual citizens often depended on informal, non-hierarchical methods of exchange such as blat in order to survive in an era of shortages. 4 As a result, the line between illegal practices and dealings that were merely shady was often murky and ambiguous, 5 forcing otherwise law-abiding citizens to engage in what Ledeneva terms "compensatory mechanisms against the planned economY:' 6 The economist David Granick has even written that "it seems a fair generalization that all Soviet managers are, ipso facto, criminals according to Soviet law;' 7 given the number of legally questionable activities a manager had to engage in simply to do his job. Moreover, many officials and managers took full advantage of their position

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to acquire hard-to-attain goods and even enrich themselves, and the USSR's socialist economy meant that shady economic behavior could not be defined the same way in Moscow as it could in the West, since there was no clear distinction between what Americans would term public corruption and white-collar crime. After all, a factory director who embezzled money was stealing not just from his employer, but from the state itself.B In practice, however, the postwar Soviet regime based its investigations of corruption and administrative wrongdoing on one main factor: nearly all of the offenses listed above involved a Communist who placed his own private interests above the greater good through the abuse of his or her job. Spelled out in full, the most common accusation leveled against corrupt Communists was the "abuse of a service position toward personal goals" (zloupotreblenie sluzhebnym polozheniem v lichnykh tseliakh), though the word "mercenary" (korystnoe) was sometimes substituted for "personal" in this formulation. This allegation mirrors most definitions of corruption by Western scholars,9 but it also captures the traditional Soviet distinction between personal (lichnye) and societal (obshchestvennye) interests,'0 and it was frequently used as a catchall for the offenses listed above. The term "abuse of a service position" could describe misconduct by Communists from many backgrounds, from kolkhoz accountants to the all-union minister of agriculture; the charge could be used against many citizens who violated state decrees on theft (khishchenie) or bribery, or sometimes against those whose conduct (although sleazy) did not actually break the law or did not fall under typical Western understandings of "corruption:' In legal terms, many of these offenses were defined as "administrative crimes" committed by an official (dolzhnostnye prestupleniia), although others were economic or property crimes whose perpetrator happened to hold office." Many corrupt officials were accused of violating the laws on theft, for example, although citizens accused of theft were not always guilty of corruption. But whatever the subject of the investigation, party organizations frequently disciplined Communists who had ignored the interests of the state and the regime and abused their position to pursue their own objectives. The misconduct at the heart of this chapter involved the abuse of a service position and other offenses committed by officials who put their own needs above those of the state. Many of the offenses considered below could be described using the nearly synonymous terms "corruption" and "administrative wrongdoing;' though others were covered by a closely related (often overlapping) crime, the theft of socialist property. Some offenses (including theft) fell beyond the traditional definition of corruption, however, since they could be committed either by a state administrator or by a rank-and-file worker. The pursuit of these crimes was a high priority for the regime: in every year covered by this volume, more Communists were expelled from the party for administrative misconduct, corruption, and theft than for any other offense. The struggle with administrative crime was especially severe in the late 1940s, 12

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when the economy was in a shambles and the regime implemented a series of harsh decrees to bolster its control over production, leading to the expulsion of 181,316 Communists for abusing their position or stealing state property between 1946 and 1951 alone.'3 But the patterns set under postwar Stalinism continued to shape official attitudes toward corruption for decades to follow. Even under Nikita Khrushchev, when the regime ended its draconian campaigns for economic control and the party's overall expulsion rate declined, the party still expelled 111,775 members for corruption and administrative misconduct, more than for any other reason.'4 As frequently as party organizations investigated their members for administrative wrongdoing, both rank-and-file Communists and party leaders had a surprisingly ambivalent attitude toward corruption: for every party member who was expelled for abusing his or her position, many more were able to avoid serious punishment for their crimes. Over time, as noted in chapter 1, increasing numbers of Communists seem to have derived their identity from their service in the state administration, not from their class background or their membership in a revolutionary vanguard; as a result, many Communists seem to have viewed petty corruption as one of the perquisites of power, becoming less likely to denounce a comrade for the abuse of his or her position or to show initiative in the struggle with corruption. As James Heinzen and Cynthia Hooper have noted, trends like these helped foster a culture of administrative malfeasance and a tolerance for wrongdoing within the party's ranks that arguably grew in significance until the collapse of the USSR. 15 Party leaders fought to resist this trend-at first through a series of strict campaigns intended to reassert the regime's firm top-down control over the economy under late Stalinism, and then through a Khrushchev-era drive to eliminate the "toleration" of wrongdoing and to mobilize angry rank-and-file Communists against "vestiges of capitalism" like bribery. These efforts, however, were doomed to failure. In an age when the memory of the revolution was fading and the party was growing increasingly bureaucratic, Communists were generally unwilling to spearhead a mass movement against corruption and bureaucratic privilege. Corruption within the party was a fact of Soviet life.

Corruption and Administrative Misconduct in the Party: The Statistics

The party's investigation of administrative misconduct did not begin with World War II, of course. During the 1921 party purge, 24 percent of expelled Communists were accused of "careerism, swindling [shkurnichestvo], and bourgeois accumulation"• 6-a figure that translated into roughly 1 percent of all Communists; during the purge of 1933-1935, 25,576 Communists (8-4 percent of all excluded party members) were expelled for "careerism, self-seeking, bureaucratism, and the use of a service position for mercenary goals:' 17 The

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latter figures were more typical of the prewar Soviet experience and resemble expulsion statistics for the seven years before 1945. In the first half of 1938, for instance, 1,941 Communists were expelled as "crooks and swindlers" (zhulikov i aferistov) (4.0 percent of all expulsions) and 353 were expelled for criminal violations (0.7 percent).'8 There were only 760 expulsions for "waste and misappropriation" (rastrata i raskhishchenie) in the first half of 1939,'9 with 4,500 such expulsions in 1940. 20 These statistics may give a slightly misleading impression of the total number of expulsions for malfeasance, since some corrupt Communists were surely purged as "wreckers" or "saboteurs;' but the party's pursuit of administrative wrongdoers nevertheless accounted for a small minority of expelled Communists before 1945. The picture changed markedly in the years after the war. First, the expulsion rate for administrative misconduct rose sharply. As table 15 shows, the party expelled 181,316 people for the "abuse of a service position" and related offenses between 1946 and 1951, compared to 53,216 in the previous six years; the annual average was thus around 30,000 expulsions. (Some of these expelled Communists were guilty of petty theft-especially of grain-and were therefore not necessarily guilty of corruption in the normal sense of the word, but a majority were accused of corruption or administrative crime; unfortunately, the relative proportions are difficult to determine, especially since some corrupt officials were prosecuted under the theft decrees.) Second, in an era when party leaders were less concerned about the class purity of the membership than ever before, nearly all Communists found guilty of administrative misconduct were accused of a straightforward, relatively apolitical, and non-ideological charge. That is, they were accused of bribery, theft, or the abuse of a service position, not of "sabotage'' or "bourgeois accumulation:' Even when a Communist's offenses hampered the work of a state agency or seriously threatened economic production, his or her ideology and loyalty were almost never called into question. Third, although combating administrative misconduct remained a high priority for the regime throughout the postwar years, corruption cases fluctuated in frequency depending on the regime's overall goals. They reached their height in the mid-to-late 1940s, as the procuracy launched high-profile campaigns against crimes like bribery and the theft of socialist property, and dropped more than 50 percent after Stalin's death. How common was expulsion for administrative misconduct? According to a 1951 KPK report, between 30.2 percent and 34.2 percent of all Communists expelled from the party by territorial party organizations each year between 1948 and 1951 were charged with "malfeasance, waste, and theft"; this was the most common reason for expulsion, resulting in between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand cases annually. 22 The same report notes that 181,316 Communists had been expelled for theft and related offenses over the last six years, along with another 10,173 Communists expelled for violations of the kolkhoz charter (a similar offense, as will be discussed below); this adds up to 191,489 expulsions, 21

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Policing the Party TABLE 15 -Expulsions for Administrative Wrongdoing, 1939-1951 OFFENSE

EXPULSIONS IN

EXPULSIONS IN

EXPULSIONS IN

EXPULSIONS IN

1939-1941

1942-1945

1946-1948

1949-1951

Abuse of a Service Position, Theft, Waste

21,055

32,161

84,092

96,414

Violation of the Agricultural Artel Charter

591

2,442

4,819

5,354

21,646

34,603

88,911

101,768

TOTAL RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 25, I. 1.

or an annual average of nearly 32,000. 23 Year-by-year statistics from the Stalin era are less helpful, since they lump together expulsions for the "abuse of a service position" with expulsions for "moral and everyday degeneracy" (moral'noe i bytovoe razlozhenie), drunkenness, and hooliganism, without giving subtotals for each offense. 24 Since other party sources suggest that expulsions for administrative crime outnumbered expulsions for degeneracy during this era by a margin of roughly seven to three, 25 these statistics also suggest that an average of roughly thirty thousand Communists were expelled each year for administrative misconduct or theft, with a much higher total at the peak of the anti-theft campaign in 1947-1948. In some years, the number of expulsions most likely neared fifty thousand, of whom a majority-most likely a sizable majority-were guilty of corruption. Corruption and administrative crime remained a serious problem after 1953, but in the post-Stalin years, the party's expulsion rate plummeted. Beginning in 1954, party statistics divide administrative offenses and moral degeneracy into separate categories of wrongdoing; from that moment onward, theft and the abuse of a service position continued to make up between 32 percent and 43 percent of all expulsions, but the raw number of cases fell sharply. (The share of Communist expelled for petty theft also appears to have fallen dramatically as the anti-theft campaign died down.) The explanation for this change, of course, was the sharp across-the-board drop in expulsions that followed Stalin's death. In Kalinin Province (whose pre-1953 statistics differentiate between moral and administrative offenses), 244 party members were expelled for "theft, waste, and the abuse of a service position'' in 1953, but only 138 in 1954-a 45 percent decline. 26 (The rate continued to drop after 1954.) The picture was similar in Molotov Province and across the USSR. In short, the investigation of corruption, theft, and administrative misconduct was one of the main priorities of the party discipline system, and throughout the postwar era, Communists were more likely to be expelled for abusing their job than they were for any other reason. In all, around three hundred thousand Communists were expelled for theft and administrative misconduct

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TABlE 1 6 -Expulsions for "Abuse of a Service Position" and Degeneracy, 1945-1953 YEAR

EXPULSIONS FOR

PERCENTAGE OF

ABUSE OF JOB, MORAL

TOTAL EXPULSIONS

DEGENERATION, DRINKING AND HOOLIGANISM

1945

32,616

36.4%

1946

37,904

36.7%

1947

55,439

44.9%

1948

68,516

40.8%

1949

58,633

41.8%

1950

53,699

46.8%

1951

38,412

44.9%

1952

40,500

42.8%

1953

34,755

25.9%

TOTAL

420,474

RGAN1 f. 77, o. I, d. 5, ll. 77 and 166; d. 6, ll. 73 and 174; d. 7, ll. 68 and 164; d. 8, ll. 76 and 175.d. 9, ll. 20.

between 1945 and 1953, and another one hundred thousand in the Khrushchev years-a pair of statistics that emphasizes both the near-constant concern of party leaders about the reliability of party members and the importance of the theft decrees and other late Stalinist policies in the disciplining of corrupt Communists. In fact, the pursuit of corruption was often driven by a simple fact: the regime's desire to impose tight top-down control over the economy and over its agents within the party. Discussions of administrative misconduct were not driven by a zeal for moral reform, but by the regime's desire to control Soviet officialdom.

Corruption, Administrative Misconduct, and the Theft of State Property under Stalin

On July 12, 1949, the obkom in Molotov heard a case that exemplified the party's approach to corruption in the late Stalin years. Comrade B-the director of a district industrial combine-oversaw a workplace in disarray: it owed its employees 22,500 rubles in back pay and had not fulfilled its quarterly production plan since 1946. An internal audit in May 1948 showed that Comrade Band his underlings had embezzled 47.483 rubles of state money and hidden those

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Table 17 -Expulsions for Administrative Offenses, 1954-1964 YEAR

EXPULSION OF FULL MEMBERS (%OF ALL EXPULSIONS)

EXPULSION OF CANDIDATES (%OF ALL EXPULSIONS)

1954

12,764 (32.3%)

1,399 (3.3%)

1955

8,675 (37.6%)

584 (3.8%)

1956

8,489 (38.3%)

512 (4.0%)

1957

8,119 (36.2%)

475 (3.4%)

1958

9,514 (36.9%)

621 (3.7%)

1959

10,108 (39.8%)

787 (4.5%)

1960

5,928 (37.3%)

647 (4.3%)

1961

10,729 (42.9%)

1,154 (25.0%)

1962

12,080 (36.0%)

1,206 (10.6%)

1963

14,011 (38.1 %)

1,315 (4.0%)

1964

11,358 (32.9%)

1,219 (3.6%)

RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 9, II. 20, 69; d. 10, 11. 5, 65, 131; d. 11, II. 5, 63, 124; d. 12, II. 5, 54, 158,217.

crimes using fake financial documents; the accused men were sentenced to three years in jail in October 1948. The party's investigation of Comrade B was almost an afterthought. The raikom voted to expel him from the party in May 1949, and the obkom followed suit in July-in each case, judging his actions in a brief, routine hearing while Comrade B was away in prison. 27 A dramatic case of white-collar crime had reached an anti-climactic conclusion. Comrade B's case featured many stereotypical features of a late Stalinist corruption scandal: it began with a routine audit, involved both the theft of money and the production of false documents, and was brought to trial in court before the party had decided the fate of the accused. Most investigations of administrative wrongdoing by Communists did not result in dramatic confrontations, contentious discussions, or politically charged hearings; they were pursued in a mundane, straightforward, and seemingly apolitical way. As late as 1946, a small number of Communists were the target of conspiratorial accusations reminiscent of the 1930s: a November 1945 resolution by Molotov's obkom urged authorities in the South Osokinskii raion to punish "saboteurs of the harvest" more severely, and kolkhoz chairmen were occasionally expelled for offenses like "the sabotage of the harvest" when they embezzled grain or stole state funds in the war's immediate aftermath!8 Accusations like these had nearly vanished by 1947, however, and charges like "bourgeois accumulation" were all but

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nonexistent after the war. Instead, party investigations of administrative wrongdoing ignored the political motivations and the class background of accused Communists and focused on whether they had taken advantage of a service position for their own "personal goals:' Many investigations were driven by the actions of prosecutors, who were enforcing a series of draconian state decrees intended to reassert the regime's control over the economy; these decrees were the basis of campaigns against accounting fraud, bribery, abuses by collective farm chairmen, and (most importantly) the theft of socialist property.'9 The result was an epidemic of expulsion cases involving Communists accused of straightforward criminal offenses, many of whom had been convicted of the crime in court and a majority of whom had committed offenses that hampered a state initiative or threatened the regime's control of the economy. The first of the postwar economic campaigns to have a significant effect on party discipline was announced on September 19, 1946, when the Council of Ministers and the Central Committee issued a decree on "the liquidation of violations of the agricultural artel charter on kolkhozes:' 3o As Jean Levesque has noted, this decree was driven by several concerns, including early postwar worries about the theft of state property and a desire to reestablish tight top-down economic control through a crackdown on peasants who illegally expanded their private plotsY It had a number of provisions, including language cracking down on the incorrect expenditure of labor-days, the misappropriation of kolkhoz land, and the "pilfering" (rastaskivanie) of kolkhoz property. One particularly influential provision of the decree criticized officials guilty of taking, "for free or at a lowered price, kolkhoz livestock, grain, seeds, feed, meat, milk, butter, honey, vegetables, fruits, and so on:' noting, "these facts suggest that some workers with responsibility, abusing their position, have entered a path of arbitrary rule [proizvol] and lawlessness in relation to collective farms, and have begun, without any shame, to treat kolkhoz property as if it came from their own pocket:'32 The decree urged the prosecution of administrators and officials who stole from the kolkhoz and helped direct the attention oflocal party organs toward the problem of self-serving collective farm officials. The expulsion of corrupt kolkhoz chairmen and local officials skyrocketed in the months that followed, and on June 4, 1947, the regime ratcheted up the pressure still further when it announced a pair of decrees against theft. 33 Those decrees dramatically toughened the country's sentencing guidelines; the minimum penalty for the theft of state property was raised from three months to seven years in prison, for example, while the minimum sentence for stealing private property rose from three months to five to six years. For crimes committed by a group or involving a large sum, the penalty could rise as high as a twenty-five-year sentence-a devastatingly harsh punishment in a country where murder was punished with a sentence of between eight and ten years and where bribery was often punished by two years' deprivation of freedom. 34 The decree against the theft of socialist property, in particular, captured the

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attention of thousands of prosecutors and control officials. As James Heinzen has noted, the two decrees most likely began as an updating of the 1932 decree concerning theft on collective farms, but they quickly became the basis of a three-pronged campaign against theft and embezzlement by kolkhozniki, industrial workers, and local officials. 35 Although some officials desperately sought ways to soften the law's impact, a total of two million people (most of them non-Communists) fell victim to the decrees in court. The campaign to enforce the 1947 theft decrees was one of the hallmarks of late Stalinist repression against the population at large, as scholars like Peter Solomon and Charles Hachten have argued, but it had more subtle effects on the workings of the party discipline system. Between 1946 and 1947, as table 14 shows, the number of expulsions for the abuse of a service position jumped by 46 percent (an increase that far outstripped the 19.5 percent totalincrease in expulsions that year); 36 this increase was driven by the growing number of cases of Communists prosecuted under the theft decree. Some of these Communists were rank-andfile kolkhozniki who could hardly be accused of "corruption;' especially in the immediate aftermath of the decree's announcement: when the Karagaiskii raikom heard the case of a kolkhoznik accused of stealing two tsentners (or two hundred kilograms) of his farm's potatoes in July 1947, its very first question was whether the accused Communists had heard about the decreeY Other representative cases concerned a peasant who stole twenty-two kilograms of rye and a security guardwho took nine sacks of grain. 38 Many victims of the law were higher-ranking officials, however, including thousands of kolkhoz chairmen, whose prosecution led to a spike in the expulsion rate in rural areas. (In 1950, for example, 10 percent of the Communists expelled in the Velikolukskaia oblast were kolkhoz chairmen accused of theft or the violation of the artel charter.)39 Other rural officials and administrators expelled for theft during this time included collective farm accountants, brigadiers, machine-tractor station directors, and raikom secretaries. The problem proved so large that the courts and the party even began to investigate procuracy officials sent to the countryside to fight corruption, some of whom had been bribed with vegetables to overlook wrongdoing. 40 The impact of the June 4 decrees extended far beyond rural regions. In April 1949, for instance, the obkom in Molotov expelled the head of a local cinema department for stealing 7,349 rubles from his workplace, along with movie tickets worth another 7,372 rubles; he was sentenced to thirteen years in jail under the theft decree just before the obkom voted to expel him. 4' The previous fall, a series of audits revealed that a storekeeper in the nearby city of Chusovoi had presided over the loss of thousands of rubles' worth of money and valuables (which he and the auditor managed to cover up); the storekeeper was expelled from the party in June 1949, once again after a conviction under the June 4 decreesY In Kalinin Province, Communists expelled for theft included a village soviet chairman who embezzled 13.475 rubles and an animal specialist from the raion agriculture department, who stole eight hundred rubles on a

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trip to a kolkhoz. 43 The Communists most likely to be expelled for pilfering from party and state coffers, however, were relatively low-ranking economic administrators. Accountants were especially likely to be charged with abusing their position, for obvious reasons: their work gave them the opportunity to embezzle, without giving them the political clout needed to avoid prosecution. 44 Tax agents and storekeepers were also likely to be charged with embezzlement and theft, although in smaller numbers than accountants and collective farm chairmen were. Although these Communists were often accused of both theft and the misuse of a position by party investigators, their cases typically began with a criminal investigation under the theft decrees. There was often a surprisingly large amount of fluidity and ambiguity in how party organizations defined the misconduct of their members. Most official sources did not differentiate between cases that might be viewed as corruption by officials, white-collar crime by bureaucrats, and petty theft by peasants and storekeepers; party statistical reports typically lumped together cases of "the abuse of a service position'' with theft by rank-and-file kolkhozniki, for example. Moreover, it was not uncommon for a PPO to expel a Communist for "theft;' for the raikom to expel the same party member for "embezzlement;' and for the obkom to expel the man or woman in question for the "abuse of a service position'' -even when the Communist had already been convicted in court under the June 4 decrees. This situation partly reflected an ambiguity in the law, since a corrupt official could be accused either of theft or of the "abuse of power" (zloupotreblenie vlasti),45 while simultaneously exemplifying the party's underdeveloped vision of administrative wrongdoing. Although corruption appears to have been on the upswing in postwar Soviet society, party publications rarely acknowledged this fact, mostly ignoring the problem of embezzlement except in brief exposes that portrayed corruption as an exceptional phenomenon. 46 Moreover, discussions of administrative wrongdoing tended to combine bromides about the sanctity of socialist property, entreaties to citizens to work hard and observe state and labor discipline, and references to the 1947 theft decrees; party leaders were unwilling to publicly acknowledge the broader problem of corruption, a decision that helped shift the initiative in corruption investigations from party organs to law enforcement agencies. Discussions of theft and corruption, in short, tended to lack a detailed or sophisticated vision of what these offenses entailed. Not all administrative misconduct cases involved embezzlement and theft, however: in particular, state and party officials began to direct increased attention to the problem of bribery in the mid-to-late 1940s. Scholars agree that bribery was a serious and growing problem in postwar Soviet life, and because of low salaries for officials (and scarce resources for everyone), citizens in search of housing, food, employment, or state benefits often needed to pay off a local official to get what they neededY On May 3, 1946, a Communist named P. I. Minin spoke to many of these concerns when he wrote a complaint to Stalin, alleging that wartime and postwar difficulties had "given rise to such phenomena as

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bribes and payoffs among unstable and greedy people:' Minin complained that everyone from doctors and mailmen to government officials was guilty of bribe-taking, but that the measures taken against bribery were so weak that they created "feelings of impunity" among officials; his letter captured the attention of high-ranking justice ministry officials and sparked what James Heinzen has termed a "campaign spasm" against bribery. 48 Beginning in 1946, Heinzen shows, the regime launched a "brief, intense, though ultimately failed" effort to combat bribery, initially seeking a surge in convictions like that spurred by the theft decrees but eventually settling for a smaller, more subtle campaign that would protect the interests of state bureaucrats without embarrassing the regime with public discussions of corruption. 49 The regime had recognized a growing problem while failing to fully address it. Nevertheless, thousands of Communists were expelled from the party for accepting bribes, including everyone from car inspectors to agronomists to housing officials.50 These cases were vastly outnumbered by theft and embezzlement cases, however, and the regime's limited measures against bribery signaled a fundamental lack of seriousness about the problem. For one thing, party members were only rarely disciplined for giving a bribe-in most cases, when they gave an unusually large bribe or combined bribe-giving with another offense.s' The real problem came when a Communist in a position of authority accepted a bribe from another citizen, suggesting that the regime was primarily concerned with a Communist's abuse of his or her job, not with the motivations of the accused or with the mere fact oflaw-breaking. Local officials and economic administrators found many opportunities to take bribes-a trade director might accept a payoff to hide a subordinate's problems at work, say, and a kolkhoz chairman might take 350 rubles from peasants who wanted to sell oats directly on the market-5 Nevertheless, a large majority of the Communists disciplined for bribery came from the police, the procuracy, the courts, or the Gulag administration. In 1950, for example, a people's judge from Novosibirsk was expelled after accepting several bribes, including four thousand rubles from one defendant, eight thousand rubles from two more, and a commode from the wife of a prisoner; 53 policemen, judges, and prosecutors often accepted smaller bribes (including goods like boots and butter) to refrain from an arrest or prosecution or to quit enforcing the terms of a Gulag sentence or an internal exile. 54 Offenses like these discredited the judicial organs, as party control officials often noted, and threatened the workings of the justice system. They also endangered other regime interests: as James Heinzen and Peter Solomon have noted, one reason for the regime's postwar anti-bribery campaign was a concern that judges were being too lenient about enforcing the government's anti-theft decrees. 55 In short, the mere fact of bribery was not enough to raise the ire of the regime. Party organs were most likely to be concerned about bribes when they involved the abuse of a position, interfered with an important policy initiative, or threatened the reputation and the smooth functioning of the judicial system. 2

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By the same token, Communists were fairly unlikely to be disciplined for speculation-an economic crime separate from corruption and administrative misconduct that entailed the resale of goods for a profit-except in cases where they abused their job or political position to participate in Russia's second economy. 56 There were, of course, a handful of cases involving the stereotypical speculator-a lazy, good-for- nothing parasite who sponged off more productive members of societyY Nevertheless, most cases involved Communists accused not just of speculation, but of abusing their position to engage in illegal trade. Railroad workers were in an especially good position to speculate: the assistant to the head of a railroad's shipping service was expelled from the party in 1947 for transporting three cows to a meat combine in empty train cars, and then selling the sausage made from the cows at the train stations he visited. 58 Secret police officers also found plenty of opportunities to profiteer, due to their privileged position and their access to stolen goods. 59 But nearly any Communist whose job lent him or her access to scarce goods could end up a speculator, from the head of an industrial workshop expelled for speculating in car roofs, to a newspaper editor involved in illegal paper sales, to a supply department head who took home 198 meters of textiles for his wife to sell at speculative prices. 60 Nearly all the Communists disciplined for speculation, then, were accused not simply of reselling goods for a profit, but of using their job or their political position to further their private interests through the theft of goods or the illegal transportation of their wares. In a postwar world where the regime put a premium on state discipline and was no longer obsessed with the class background of its members, the focus in speculation cases shifted from the alleged greed of the Communist to the impact of misconduct on his or her workplace. The relative infrequency of speculation cases speaks volumes about the priorities of the postwar Soviet regime. Party leaders were not terribly concerned with either the loyalty or the ideological purity oflocal officials-very few cases center on Communists' supposed desire for "bourgeois accumulation;' and even fewer deal with a party member's alleged "sabotage" or ties to suspect social groups. Likewise, almost no cases deal directly with nepotism or semeistvennost' ("family circles")-two forms of corruption that could easily have been a higher priority for the Kremlin, especially given that the Nineteenth Party Congress was sufficiently worried about the problem of cadre selection that it added a provision to the party charter denouncing cronyism and threatening to expel Communists who did not make appointments based on the "political and practical qualities" of would-be office-holders. 6' Instead, party discipline cases focused almost exclusively on disciplining administrators and officials who put their own interests ahead of the regime's by abusing their position for personal gain. Kremlin officials seem to have taken it for granted that local leaders did not have a political agenda of their own and shared the regime's values; they used expulsion as a tool to ensure that those values were the top priority of the country's Communists. Party discipline cases, then, were often surprisingly

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silent on the profit-seeking goals of Communists, while focusing their attention on workplace abuses. The issue at the heart of the regime's pursuit of theft and corruption, then, was the interests of the state. On the most basic level, many party investigations of administrative wrongdoing paid close attention to the impact of a Communist's actions on economic production-a fact exemplified by the case of a kolkhoz chairman from Kalinin Province. In January 1947, the Communist in question was expelled because he "squandered" (razbazarival) 570 liters of milk, making 300 of those liters into butter (which he sold), taking 231liters for himself, and giving away the rest; of the 8,500 liters of milk that the state expected the kolkhoz to produce, only 3,233 were delivered. 62 This case was typical of the party's approach: in example after example, local party organs pointed out the number of rubles an official had cost the state and criticized officials who had fallen short in their duties. If nothing else, the expulsion of kolkhoz chairmen and factory directors for administrative misconduct often went hand-in-hand with their failure to fulfill their state obligations, showing the postwar regime's desire to tighten its control over the economy. Although some incompetent kolkhoz officials avoided any measures of party discipline and some expelled kolkhoz chairmen were punished for economically harmless corruption, it appears that economic administrators were more likely to be expelled for administrative wrongdoing when their enterprises ran into trouble. This fact can be explained in three ways. First, control officials were more likely to audit an economic enterprise that was not meeting its obligations, which could lead to the discovery of its manager's misconduct. Second, an administrator whose factory or kolkhoz was falling short of its goals often lacked the political clout needed to save himself from a corruption probe. Third, the regime was more likely to crack down on acts of corruption that were especially likely to hamper its policies. In all likelihood, each of these factors played a role in shaping the regime's attitude toward administrative wrongdoing. Many of the officials expelled when their corruption interfered with a state initiative were accused of wrongdoing that impeded the monetary reform of 1947. Inflation ran rampant after the war, and the printing of money had far outstripped the production of goods and services; as a result, the Soviet regime decided to revalue the ruble in December 1947, requiring Soviet citizens to trade in their money for a smaller number of"new rubles" at a series of forty-six thousand exchange points across the country. Local officials were sent a packet of materials (ominously marked "open only upon receipt of official instructions") with the details of the reform: citizens could trade in the first three thousand rubles of their savings for revalued rubles on a one-to-one basis, could redeem state bonds on a three-to-one basis, and could exchange their cash and all other savings at a rate of ten to one. Secrecy was crucial for the reform to work, since well-informed citizens could find ways to hold on to their money if they knew about the reform ahead of time. 63

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In early 1948, prosecutors and party committees therefore cracked down on a large number oflocal officials, secret police workers, and bank administrators who used their knowledge of the impending reform to hold on to their savings. 64 Comrade 0, for example, was a district head of the ministry of state security in Tambov Province when the government announced the reform. Comrade 0 opened the government's secret packet prematurely and divulged its contents to his coworkers; he then split his seven-thousand-ruble savings account into two new accounts (one under his own name and one under his wife's), and deposited another 3,940 rubles under two assumed names. 65 Something similar happened in a case from the Altai krai, where an MVD district chief conspired with the head of the local savings bank. Comrade A divided 9,750 rubles of his savings into three accounts (in his own name, his daughter's, and his sister's), claiming that his relatives had coincidentally chosen to put their money in the bank on the same day. (KPK workers rejected this claim, noting that his daughter "is a student, and it is unknown where she could have gotten 3,ooo rubles:') Due to poor oversight by Comrade A and his co-conspirator, the local bank accepted around four hundred thousand rubles in new accounts for raion workers on December 14 and 15, threatening the reform and ensuring Comrade Pl.s expulsion. 66 Other Gosbank officials around the USSR were expelled . when they let word of the reforms get out and accepted tens of thousands of rubles in new accounts before the reform could be implemented. 67 In all, 5 percent of the Communists expelled by Molotov's obkom in 1948 were guilty of manipulating the currency reforms, suggesting that interference with the law was a major cause of the all-union spike in administrative misconduct cases that year. 68 Once again, two issues were at stake in currency cases: self-interested actions by officials and the implementation of the reform. The first point is self-explanatory: a report to the Central Committee denounced local officials who tried to save their personal savings during the reform, noting, "instead of protecting state interests, they took a path of fraud and shameless deceit of the state, using the monetary reform in their personal, mercenary interests:'69 The Ukrainian Central Committee lamented the fact that a wide variety of leading workers "turned out to be people who were not only incapable of defending the interests of the state from the encroachments of speculators, cheats, and rogues, but who also became the organizers of anti-state misdeeds with the goal of personal profit:' 7o As these quotations suggest, it was especially galling to party leaders that the corruption of local officials had threatened an important regime initiative, making it all the more surprising that many officials were forgiven when they agreed to refund the state the money they had cost it. (In 238 of the 489 currency reform cases heard by the KPK in 1948 and 1949, the expelled Communist was restored to the party-meaning that an astounding 48.7 percent of all appeals to Moscow were successful.) 7 ' By contrast, officials who spread rumors of the reform or allowed others to preserve their savings

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were often treated harshly, even when they were primarily guilty of lenience rather than personal corruption.7 The regime's response to corruption during the currency reform, then, was mixed: some guilty Communists managed to get back into the party, but even high-ranking officials could be expelled when their actions threatened the reform's success. The policy interests of the regime, after all, consistently played a large role in party discussions of administrative misconduct. When a leading Soviet legal dictionary defined "the abuse of power or of a service position" in 1953, it began by expressing an idea that often played a crucial role in party discipline cases. "The socialist state gives to administrative personnel defined powers and demands from them an honest attitude to their work and to the performance of their official duties, guided exclusively by the interests of the state;' it declared, before going on to note that acts of administrative malfeasance "can bring great harm to the socialist state and to the rights and legal interests of citizens:'73 This definition is striking for the importance it attached not to the interests of the public or of society at large, but to the needs of the state-an emphasis that began to decrease in 1960, when the law was amended to say that the abuse of a service position had caused harm "to state and public interests:' 74 This focus on the needs of the state had many far-reaching consequences. On the one hand, party organs were typically more likely to discipline Communists for "the abuse of a service position'' when their actions threatened an important state initiative, like the monetary reform of 1947 or the campaigns against theft. On the other hand, some accused Communists succeeded in escaping serious punishment when their actions did not directly threaten a state initiative-even if it damaged the party's reputation and legitimacy. After all, the state's approach to administrative wrongdoing was defined by one central paradox: although the number of expulsions for corruption skyrocketed in the late Stalin years, tolerance for corrupt behavior was arguably also on the rise. A series of tough state decrees had shown the regime's growing concern about crime within Soviet officialdom, but as outlined in the next section, this concern was not always translated into activism among party members. The regime's top-down efforts to combat corruption often failed to confront the root of the problem. 2

Obstacles to the Struggle with Corruption: Passive Communists and Interference in Court In June 1946, N. M. Rychkov-the USSR's justice minister-wrote a letter to the Central Committee about the regime's plans for a campaign against bribery. "The struggle with bribery demands the mobilization of the public, in particular to overcome the conciliatory attitude of party members to this shameful phenomenon;' he wrote, before continuing:

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In the meantime, party, Komsomol and trade union organizations in a majority of cases do not lead educational work in this direction. Many party members, knowing about acts of bribery, do not report them to investigators. Not only that, but there are times when senior party workers stand up for bribe-takers.... We need to end the conciliatory attitude to bribe-takers and the passivity of party organizations and party members in the struggle with bribery.75 These ideas recurred again and again in party discussions of administrative misconduct. In 1948, Ukraine's Central Committee berated the obkom in Kyiv for its "unacceptable tolerance" of officials who took advantage of the monetary reform/6 A 1952 KPK report lamented the high number of expulsions for corruption since 1939, but reserved its sharpest criticism for Communists who had failed to combat corruption themselves. "It is also very bad that malfeasance, embezzlement, and waste are, as a rule, uncovered by the judicial-investigatory organs, and not by party organs or by Communists;'n it remarked, adding All of this swindling took place before the eyes of Communists, and ignoring it was not in any way allowed. But no party members raised the question until one of the criminals was arrested. . . . All these and other facts take place because party organizations do not fulfill the function of control over the economic activity of enterprises, and stand aloof from one of their primary responsibilities.7 8 This was a common sentiment in postwar party discourse. A 1952 KPK report from Kalinin Province made the same point using nearly identical language, repeating the sentence beginning "it is also very bad" nearly word-for-word. As evidence, it cited the case of a man expelled from the party more than a year after he was sentenced to jail for stealing eleven thousand rubles; no Communists spoke at the PPO meeting that expelled him, highlighting the passive approach of many party members. 79 These complaints exemplified the attitudes ofcontrol officials across the USSR, who viewed the "passivity" of the country's Communists-as well as their "conciliatory" and "tolerant" attitudes-as a serious failure in the party's efforts to instill its values in the membership at large. First of all, local party organizations were not (in the words of one KPK report) "creating public opinion of universal contempt for thieves and swindlers"80-a clear failure of vospitanie. At the same time, local party organizations were allowing the investigation of administrative wrongdoing to languish through incompetence and disorganization. PPOs and raikoms often engaged in formulaic discussions of Communists' misconduct, in blatant violation of a long list of party rules; they missed deadlines, ignored the right of accused party members to attend their own misconduct hearings, and decided the fate of the accused at brief, discussion-free meetings. These failings

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made misconduct hearings useless as a tool of vospitanie and weakened the impact of expulsion and censure as weapons against corruption, to the point where many local prosecutors actually arrested Communists without the party's permission or knowledge. In other cases, local party officials actively intervened in the judicial process to protect their comrades from prosecution while limiting their punishment to a party reprimand. In short, the complacency and disorganization oflocal party organs was accentuating the leadership's failure to turn Communists into anti-corruption activists, leaving prosecutors-not party organizations-as the regime's main tool against administrative misconduct. By and large, the control officials quoted above seem to have been correct when they argued that most Communists had a "conciliatory attitude" toward corruption. Many theft and embezzlement investigations were indeed sparked by denunciations, but those denunciations were often anonymous complaints from citizens, not public criticism by Communists;8' party corruption investigations were most likely to arise after a routine financial audit. Moreover, those PPO meetings that did discuss corruption were often extremely short and typically failed to address the wrongdoing of the accused in detail. In many cases, PPO members failed to ask any questions of the accused, posed vague and formulaic queries, or focused on secondary charges (like drunkenness or a lack of discipline) instead of more complicated accusations of financial impropriety. In all likelihood, this state of affairs both resulted from and helped to perpetuate the "tolerant attitude" bemoaned by many control officials. Some Communists may have lacked the technical knowledge needed for a detailed discussion of financial wrongdoing. Others may have wanted to criticize an accused comrade for corruption while remaining wary of doing so-after all, the party members most likely to be accused of embezzlement and bribery were likely to hold positions of influence at work, and may even have helped set the agenda of party meetings discussing misconduct. (In fact, a substantial number of rank-and-file Communists were probably despondent about corruption, rather than "tolerant" or "conciliatorY:') Finally, many accused Communists did not attend the hearing that decided their fate, often because they had been arrested or were on the run from the law, which helped give party hearings on corruption a rote and formulaic atmosphere. Misconduct hearing transcripts involving administrative misconduct are therefore among the briefest, dullest, and least informative of the postwar era. The absence of the accused nearly always prevented misconduct hearings from playing a valuable educational role for the party organization, but the problem of absentee Communists also reflected a deeper issue: in many cases, KPK reports pointed out, Communists were being prosecuted in court without the knowledge or permission of local party organs, which could lead to their imprisonment before the party had begun an investigation. In 1950, for instance, the Velikolukskii obkom expelled 234 Communists for embezzlement and the abuse of a service position; 175 of them (74·7 percent) were already

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serving in jail at the time of their expulsion. "Sometimes party organs find out about the prosecution of a Communist 2-3 years after his conviction;' a KPK report from the province concluded. "This speaks to the fact that party organs have quit paying attention to the party investigation of the cases of Communists accused of a legal offense, wholly entrusting the fate of Communists to the investigatory organs:'82 KPK investigators in other provinces reached the same conclusions. In Voronezh, 222 party members were convicted of a crime in early 1947, and a clear majority (6o.8 percent) were prosecuted before party organs could judge them. The obkom bureau therefore denounced district committees for "plac[ing] the consideration of the question of Communists' party status in direct dependence on the decisions of judicial-investigatory organs:'83 A 1946 report from Murmansk, finally, noted a sharp rise in the number of expulsions, 70 percent of which concerned the abuse of a service position, theft, or the violation of labor discipline. "Questions about the party membership of Communists accused of committing criminal offenses are as a rule examined by party organs only after the resolution ofthe cases by judicial organs;' a KPK official complained, accusing party organs of "mechanically re-writ[ing] the decisions of the court, without investigating the essence of the case:' 84 This situation seems to have been the norm in the late Stalin era, leading to complaints by the KPK that a majority of the Communists accused of administrative misconduct were brought to justice by pro curacy officials, not by Communists and party committees. 85 As pointed out in chapter 1, a Communist could only be prosecuted with the written sanction of his or her raikom; some postwar party organizations routinely granted prosecutors permission to arrest their members (while postponing a party investigation until a verdict was rendered in court), while others did not notice or care when their members were arrested. The latter problem in particular highlighted a serious shortcoming in the work of many party organizations, which were often too disorganized to keep track of their members (whether they had moved away or been arrested). To be sure, there was one way in which Communists did play a crucial role in bringing their corrupt comrades to justice: many of the judges and prosecutors who led the fight against bribery and embezzlement were members of the party. Nevertheless, these Communists were not acting as party members, but in their professional capacity as representatives of the judiciary, the procuracy, and the police. Control officials were correct to argue that party membership was not automatically translated into a spirit of public-minded activism and that party organizations were failing in their traditional role in the oversight of workplace managers. 86 In some cases, moreover, the problem went much deeper. In May 1946, a prosecutor named Sukhov from Saratov Province wrote a complaint to the USSR's procurator-general that neatly encapsulated the concerns of prosecutors from across the Soviet Union. Sukhov, a World War II veteran, had been demobilized from the army in March 1946 and given a job in the provincial

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procuracy, and his problems began when he tried to prosecute a kolkhoz chairman and a kolkhoz accountant for embezzlement. The raikom voted to give each man a censure and refused to sanction their prosecution, and its secretary told Sukhov "that without [the party secretary's] permission, the procuracy could not carry out its functions and that the procuracy was under the command of the raikom alone:' "When I cited sections 117 and 121 of the Stalin Constitution;' Sukhov said, "Secretary Polynin answered that for him this was not the law, but the law for him was the party charter:'87 Sukhov's letter concerned the procurator-general enough that he sent a report to the Central Committee complaining of the treatment of Sukhov, of a Mordovian district prosecutor expelled from the party after trying to prosecute local politicians for corruption, and of several Lithuanian and Kazakh procurators who had also tried to prosecute kolkhoz chairmen for administrative wrongdoing. 88 Sukhov's letter pointed to a final wrinkle in the Communist Party's pursuit of corruption: although many Communists were complacent and passive in the struggle with administrative wrongdoing, others engaged in outright resistance to any serious investigation of the problem. 89 In 1948 alone, the USSR's procurator-general received similar complaints from officials in Ul'ianov, Iaroslavi: Dnipropetrovs'k, Poltava, Krasnodar, Omsk, Tomsk, Kursk, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan;90 the problem worsened in late 1952, when party secretaries in locations as far-flung as Latvia and Irkutsk tried to block the arrest of Communists under the pretense of enforcing a new provision in the party charter. 9' The USSR's procurator-general expressed the concerns of dozens of Soviet prosecutors in a 1949 report on Kostroma Province, declaring that "there are, in essence, two criminal codes [in the province], one for Communists and another for everyone else. There have been a number of instances where, for one and the same crime, the party member remains free while the non-Communist languishes in prison:' 92 These worries appear to have grown more common during the postwar Stalin years-the result, it seems, of the party's growing bureaucratization and perhaps of its high-ranking members' increasing identity as officials, not as watchdogs over the apparatus. In the late 1940s, some raikom chairmen took advantage of a 1938 resolution of the Central Committee and Council of Ministers (described in chapter 1) to deny prosecutors the written "sanction" they needed to prosecute Communists, even though-as Yoram Gorlizki has written-that 1938 resolution was based on the assumption that party organs would routinely approve any reasonable arrest request; 93 a variety of other official documents, including a 1936 resolution of the KPK, emphasized that all Communists were to be punished in court when they broke the law. 94 In October 1952, the Nineteenth Party Congress added to the confusion when it passed an amendment to the party charter declaring that "in those cases when a party member has committed an offense punishable in a court of law, he is expelled from the party with a report on the offense to the administrative and judicial authorities:' 95 This clause

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was apparently intended to emphasize that Communists should be prosecuted for their crimes, but some party leaders pursued a different interpretation; for example, Astrakhan's gorkom secretary informed the city's district procurators and judges that "not one member of the party or candidate member could be brought to criminal responsibility by the procuracy or a judge until the question had been decided by a party organ, that is, beginning with the primary party organization and ending with the obkom:'96 In February 1953, one of the USSR's deputy justice ministers summed up the growing concerns of Soviet prosecutors when he wrote a lengthy report to the Central Committee criticizing party interventions in criminal cases involving Communists. 97 Procuracy reports make it difficult to measure the full extent of party interference. Most complaints by prosecutors included a brief list of Communists who had avoided prosecution, treating those cases as typical without providing any statistics about the problem; when prosecutors did provide statistics, their data sometimes did not back up their conclusions. In 1948, for example, the chief procurator of the USSR's railroad system wrote a report complaining about the protection of Communists by party organizations within the railroad. From January to August, he wrote, 1,511 railroad workers had broken the law, of whom 779 (or 51.5 percent) were Communists; of that total, 1,242 people (including 636 Communists) were convicted. 98 Although these statistics were meant to show that party members were being protected from criminal investigations, they actually revealed that 82.79 percent of the non-Communists accused of breaking the law were brought to justice, compared to 81.64 percent of Communists. According to the prosecutor's own data, party membership resulted in a decline in the conviction rate of only 1.15 percent. Other reports hinted at a larger problem, but provided statistics that were less conclusive than prosecutors believed. A prosecutor from Iaroslavl' noted that 501 Communists had been charged with a crime in the province in 1948, but that only 177 had been arrested; the arrest rate was extremely low in rural areas, but reached 48 percent in Iaroslavl' and 67 percent in Shcherbakov. 99 This report suggests that party interference was a very real problem everywhere in the province, but was especially severe in agricultural regions. Nevertheless, a 1950 KPK report from the same city detailed the cases of hundreds of Communists who had been prosecuted long before the party had judged their cases. Of 519 Communists expelled for theft, waste, and the abuse of a service position in laroslavl' Province in 1949 and early 1950, 17 had been convicted in 1944-1946, 55 in 1947, and 204 in 1948.100 There was nothing stopping party organs from preventing the prosecution of some Communists without noticing that others had been sent to jail, but this data strongly suggests that the party was not systematically blocking prosecutions. Taken together, these reports suggest several conclusions about party interference in the courts. First, a small minority of raikoms and obkoms seems to have intervened systematically when Communists were accused of a crime; these

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party organs were apparently few in number, but constituted a serious problem nevertheless. Second, cases of party interference were more likely in rural or peripheral parts of the USSR. Although abuses occurred everywhere, they were less likely in cities and more likely in Siberia and Central Asia, suggesting that greater distances from the center led to less oversight, to more poorly trained personnel, or to greater autonomy for local officials. Third, and unsurprisingly, well-connected and high-ranking Communists could be shielded from prosecution anywhere in the USSR, even when their raikoms were otherwise inclined not to intervene in the judicial process. Although party interference in criminal cases was not a systematic problem, it highlighted the party's declining watchdog role nonetheless. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to suggest that the party's declining interest in corruption under postwar Stalinism was the straightforward result of rank-and-file Communists' lack of zeal: in many instances, even the country's top leaders seem to have lost interest in fighting administrative wrongdoing. A 1947 report from Moldavia, for example, excoriated the republic's party organizations for their "extremely insufficient measures of struggle with theft, misappropriation, and self-supplying among leading party workers:' In particular, the report lamented, party organs "softly approach the evaluation of misdeeds committed by [local officials], overturn the decisions of lower party organizations with the formulation 'Considering the sincere recognition of the mistakes he made; and in some cases pass completely baseless resolutions on restoration to the party:'w• The problem of corruption extended from PPOs all the way up to the republic's Central Committee, which systematically ignored signals about corruption among high-level officials!02 Even the republic's minister of light industry and deputy minister of education had been shielded from prosecution.•03 Many of the problems discussed in this chapter were evident in a 1947 case from Kuntsevo, the city best known as the site of Stalin's dacha. According to a KPK investigation, a clique oflocal officials had misappropriated sixty thousand rubles from the ministry of machine construction; the money was intended for the construction of homes for factory workers, but was used instead to build houses for the gorkom chairman, a factory director, and several other administrators. Nevertheless, when they returned their new houses to the state housing fund, each guilty Communist escaped expulsion and received a simple reprimand noted on his party card -even though the group had illegally used the labor of factory workers and had failed to build a single home for the factory's workers! 04 The fact that these cases were investigated by the KPK -and not by a wayward raikom that had escaped Moscow's oversight-highlights the extent to which the party as a whole had become surprisingly tolerant of corruption. Communists who blatantly stole from the state, hampering a major policy initiative, were given a slap on the wrist when they agreed to repay the state for the cost of their actions.

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The Struggle with Corruption and Administrative Crime under Khrushchev

In many ways, of course, the party's approach to corruption and administrative wrongdoing remained the same under Khrushchev as it had under Stalin. In the eleven years following Stalin's death, the party expelled an average of more than ten thousand Communists a year for "administrative misdeeds [dolzhnostnye prostupki], waste, and theft"; although this marked a sharp drop in the number of cases, administrative offenses were still the leading cause of expulsion, accounting for between 32 percent and 42 percent of the expulsions of full party members each year. 105 By and large, these cases seem to have targeted the same crimes that had been common under Stalin-a majority fell under the June 4 decrees on theft, with a smaller number of cases involving bribery. Theft, in particular, remained a commonly prosecuted crime, even after the Stalinist anti-theft campaign had ended, but a larger proportion of Khrushchev-era Communists punished under the June 4 decrees seem to have been officials guilty of embezzlement (rather than rank-and-file workers guilty of petty theft). The biggest change in the party's pursuit of corruption, then, was also the biggest change in the Khrushchev-era party discipline system as a whole: expulsion from the party had become more difficult since the death of Stalin. This change simultaneously made it more difficult for party organs to deal with corrupt Communists and pushed them to address corruption through the mobilization of their members, often through efforts to stigmatize corrupt officials and mobilize Communists to denounce and criticize them. Even so, the atmosphere surrounding administrative misconduct had begun to subtly change. On May 7, 1961, R. A. Rudenko-the procurator-general of the USSR-wrote an article for the newspaper Izvestiia laying out the greatest challenge facing anti-corruption investigators in the post-Stalin era. "In the Soviet state, coercion has never been a major weapon in the struggle for socialist justice;' he began, repeating a claim frequently made in the Khrushchev years. "The main method of action for our state has always been persuasion, while coercion has been of secondary importance:' In recent years, he added, "persuasion and the education of the masses" had grown still more in significance; since the death of Stalin, the "application of the power of public opinion'' (obshchestvennoe mnenie) had helped many criminals learn the error of their ways, without the need for more coercive measures like arrest and expulsion from the party. Nevertheless, although Rudenko felt that persuasion and education were valuable tools in the struggle with corruption, he worried that they had led to an overly lenient attitude toward corrupt officials. He therefore proposed the strengthening of "the struggle against especially dangerous crimes;' warning that the greater role of the public in the protection of public order does not in the least signify a weakening of the state in fighting crime or a lenient attitude

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toward criminals who commit serious crimes dangerous to society, toward habitual offenders, and toward those who maliciously refuse to submit to the rule of socialist society and resist education [vospitanie ]. Rudenko singled out several groups that particularly deserved to be the targets of state coercion, including parasites, loafers, habitual criminals, and "the pilferers of state property:' In fact, he devoted more time to officials who embezzled state funds than he did to any other group. 106 Rudenko's article exemplified the challenge facing the party discipline system under Khrushchev. As noted in chapter 1, the country's new leaders made an effort to revitalize the party as an institution in the years following 1953; their efforts at the mobilization of individual Communists and party organizations were most significant when it came to the struggle with drunkenness and social instability, but they affected the war on corruption as well. In the years after Stalin's death, and especially after the beginning of Khrushchev's campaign to rally obshchestvennost' in the late 1950s, the Soviet press witnessed an explosion of newspaper articles denouncing bribery, embezzlement, speculation, and theft, and calling on all citizens (especially Communists) to denounce officials guilty of corruption. 107 Khrushchev himself included a strong attack on bribery and embezzlement in his report to the November 1962 plenum of the Central Committee, treating his attack on corruption as part of his call for Communists "to restore and strictly observe the Leninist principles of party-state control:' Noting that Lenin had called bribes "the most evil enemy of the revolution;' Khrushchev attacked Stalin for de-emphasizing the people's control from below. "In the period of the cult of personality;' he announced, "and especially when the mass repressions began, many of the important functions of control were transferred to the organs of state security, the leaders of which-as we knowtried to stand above the party:'ws Now it was time to return the struggle with corruption to the party and the people, but as Rudenko pointed out, public control-and the powers of "persuasion'' -were not always the most effective tools in the fight against administrative wrongdoing. The author of a front-page Pravda editorial from April1961 summed up the regime's vision. "The Communist Party has educated [vospitala] a manynumbered army of experienced, tested, and politically tempered leaders, for whom selfless service to the people is their highest duty;' the editorial began, before noting that the country's leaders also included a minority of "politically immature" people with a "spirit of careerism alien to our society"; the latter group were guilty of crimes ranging from the abuse of their position to false accounting. The editorial's author went on to call for "control from below" by "the party and non-party masses" to liquidate the mistakes and abuses of this minority, but the author's focus remained on "the instilling [vospitanie] in workers of a spirit of higher consciousness of state interests:' The writer hinted at the need to punish or purge the "politically immature" officials he had mentioned, but did not dwell

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on that point, instead focusing on the growth of "public control" (obshchestvennyi kontrol) and the education of new generations ofleaders. 109 In short, the Khrushchev-era campaign against officials guilty of corruption was characterized by ambiguity: the regime seemed to want citizens to denounce economic administrators and political leaders for corruption, but it also wanted to discourage expulsion from the party in favor of the increased use of"education'' and "persuasion:' Even the leadership's focus on "persuasion'' could be rather ambiguous, since encouraging denunciations and the stigmatization of bribe-takers was itself rather coercive and the regime's approach became harsher beginning in 1961; as Miriam Dobson has shown, the regime also made a series of shifts from "redemption'' to "excision'' in its criminal policy.no (The desire to emphasize "persuasion'' and "redemption'' was apparent from the beginning of the Khrushchev years and reached its height under the obshchestvennost' campaign between 1959 and 1961.) As Rudenko's article suggests, two important priorities of the regime-the reinvigoration of the party's watchdog role and a de-emphasis on coercion and repression-had proven to be at cross-purposes. As table 14 shows, the number of Communists expelled for "the abuse of a service position'' fell in each of the four years after Stalin's death, reaching a low of 8,119 full members of the party in 1957; thus, although the regime was interested in fighting corruption, the expulsion rate fell by over so percent. This change mirrored a drop in the judicial system's prosecution rate for theft, which fel137 percent between 1953 and 1954 (and 49 percent between 1949 and 1954).112 Many Khrushchev-era officials were unhappy with this development: as James Heinzen has noted, high-ranking procuracy officials lamented that the decline in prosecutions was not matched by a decline in "large-scale and organized thefts" and continued to define the theft of state property as an "especially dangerous crime:'n3 The regime's pursuit of corrupt officials therefore experienced a partial resurgence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with a rise in prosecutions and expulsions in the late 1950s and a return to still greater coercion after 1960. The May 4, 1961, law on parasitism singled out officials who illegally built themselves dachas with public funds; a day later, the Supreme Soviet's decree "on strengthening the struggle against especially dangerous crimes" cracked down on officials accused of large-scale embezzlement; decrees from July 1961 and February 1962 targeted speculation and bribery. These decrees even allowed for the use of the death penalty in cases involving officials accused of repeated bribe-taking or embezzlement (or of offenses involving large sums of money) .114 This tougher approach to administrative and economic crimes was matched by a small rise in expulsions for corruption: the number of Communists expelled for administrative misconduct rose nearly every year after 1957, reaching a high of 14,011 in 1963 before dropping to 11,358 in 1964.115 In short, party organizations had begun expelling more Communists for administrative wrongdoing by the late 1950s and early 1960s, but even in 111

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1963-when the total number of expulsions was highest-fewer Communists lost their party membership for the abuse of their job than they had in any year of the postwar Stalin years. In all, 111,775 Communists were expelled for administrative offenses between 1954 and 1964-an average of just over ten thousand a year. While this represented a significant number of Soviet officials, the party had often expelled three times as many Communists a year for related offenses under Stalin. The party's rhetorical assault on corruption was not matched by a similar upsurge in the expulsion of Communists guilty of administrative misconduct. The reasons for these changes are clear. First, the drop in criminal prosecutions for theft decreased the number of investigations of Communists for corruption during a time when control officials were still worried about the vigilance and enthusiasm of party members. Second, as noted in chapter 1, Khrushchev and the party leadership were actively encouraging party organs not to expel their members. This change in tone was most pronounced in political cases, as discussed in chapter 3; moreover, it was easier to discourage expulsion in favor of persuasion and education in cases where a Communist could plausibly promise to reform his character. (A philanderer could more plausibly promise to leave his mistress and return to his family than a serial embezzler could claim that he would give up theft, after all.) Third, although the regime sought to make party organs a more vibrant force in Soviet society, it directed much of its anti-corruption energy into other channels. When the regime decided to take stronger measures in the struggle with "especially dangerous crimes;' for example, much of its energy was directed into the court system. Party organs became more peripheral in the struggle with corruption than they had been in most Stalinist campaigns of the 1930s. Local party organizations, then, were left in the uncomfortable position of being barraged with editorials denouncing bribery and theft, at the same time they were being urged not to expel their members. As a result, they did expel their fair share of Communists, but they also chose to leave plenty of corrupt Communists within the party and to punish a surprisingly large number of officials with reprimands. In a typical case from March 1960, for example, the party committee of Saratov's GPZ-3 ball-bearing factory investigated the conduct of Comrade E, a thirty-year-old administrator. He was accused of taking a 1,500-ruble bribe from a coworker to give up his factory-owned apartment, but claimed complete ignorance of the transaction: his friend had supposedly approached Comrade E's mother at home, explained his need for housing, and given her the money, all behind Comrade E's back. ("Even I knew nothing about it;' he explained feebly.) The trouble had begun the previous May, when Comrade E had completed work on a house of his own, but refused to move out of his apartment; he continued his intransigence even when a worker at his workshop (a new father) lost his housing, relenting only in exchange for the bribe. The factory committee rejected Comrade E's story as ridiculous and denounced his behavior, but its anger would only go so far. The committee overturned the decision

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of Comrade E's PPO to expel him from the party and allowed him to keep his high-profile administrative job, limiting his punishment to a strict reprimand."6 Cases like this highlight a common theme that united the Khrushchev and Stalin eras: the unwillingness of many party committees to punish their members for bribery and embezzlement, even in cases where party members openly questioned the veracity of the accused. The problem went much deeper, however, as exemplified by an April1962 case heard by the KPK. Several high-ranking officials in Kurgan Province's administration of internal affairs were accused by a colleague of using their position to illegally build themselves dachas and then firing him and baselessly giving him a party censure when he denounced them; although the KPK declared that each of the officials deserved expulsion, it voted to censure them instead when they confessed their crimes!'7 Even in the midst of a Khrushchev-endorsed crackdown on corruption, the KPK's members decided that the accused Communists' promise to reform was genuine enough for them to be forgiven-despite the fact that these men had enriched themselves at the expense of their region's workers and then punished a Communist with the courage to point out their crime. As shown in earlier sections of this chapter, plenty of party organs of the Stalin era had made similar decisions, but the party's new focus on persuasion and education gave Communists of the Khrushchev period an excuse to act leniently toward accused Communists while claiming that a simple reprimand would inspire offenders to change their ways. The Khrushchev regime did make one clear break with the pre-1953 status quo, however: a campaign against the interference of local party organs in the judicial system."8 This issue began to draw greater attention in the fall of 1953, when a raikom in Tula voted to condemn a judge named N. Ia. Tarakonova for her unwillingness to follow instructions from the party; a wide array of national party figures quickly rallied to her defense. Interference by the party in specific criminal cases "undermines the authority of the court and disorients judges, forcing them to adopt illegal decisions and to violate the principle, established in the constitution, of the independence of the courts and their subordination solely to the law;' declared an article in Partiinaia zhizn' by Rudenko, who had just taken over as procurator-general;"9 a Central Committee resolution denounced party interference in legal cases in March 1954, and in October 1961, the Twenty-Second Party Congress voted to amend the party charter, replacing the old Paragraph 13 with a new article stating definitively that "if a member of the party commits an offense, punishable under the criminal code, he is expelled from the party and prosecuted according to the law:'l2o Party and state officials unanimously reaffirmed the principle that although the party would continue to provide "guidance" to the court on the local level, "interference" in specific cases would no longer be tolerated. As Yoram Gorlizki has noted, this campaign was tied to the regime's growing emphasis on "socialist legality" -a focus that also animated its efforts to rehabilitate the victims of Stalin and restore a sense of law and order to the judicial system.' The campaign was likely made easier 2'

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by the declining number of expulsions, since as the number of misconduct cases declined, party organs had more time to examine each one in depth; in any case, it seems to have been at least somewhat successful in combating party interference in the courts. The party's struggle with corruption, then, changed in several ways under Nikita Khrushchev. The campaign for socialist legality led to a decrease in party interference in the justice system, for example, while the regime's efforts to emphasize vospitanie and rally obshchestvennost' in the struggle with corruption helped to demonize administrative wrongdoing while making expulsion more difficult. But the main narrative underlying Khrushchev-era corruption investigations was a continuation of trends from the Stalin years. Although the party leadership hoped to restore the vitality and vigilance of local party organs, its efforts to stigmatize wrongdoing were hampered by a decline in the expulsion rate and by the continuing bureaucratization of the party.

CHAPTER FIVE

Sex and the Married Communist Family Troubles and Marital Infidelity in the Postwar Communist Party

O

N SEPTEMBER 17, 1957, theCommunistParty'sobkominMolotov debated the case of a veterinarian named Comrade R. Comrade R admitted that he had a problem: for the last two years, he explained, he "could not organize his family life with his wife:' The raikom that had heard his case several months earlier phrased the issue much more forcefully, expelling him from the party for "an un-party-like attitude to his family, the systematic mockery of his wife, the non-recognition of his guilt before his family and his party organization, and his categorical refusal to preserve his family for the sake of his child:' Lower party organs had summoned Comrade R to defend his behavior five times before; he had repeatedly ignored the advice of fellow Communists to get his family life in order. As a result, Comrade R became one of the thousands of Communists who were expelled or reprimanded by the party for "unworthy conduct in family life" (nedostoinoe povedenie v semeinom bytu) in the twenty years after World War 11. The most striking feature of this case was its intimate, deeply personal nature. Comrade R had spent two years cohabiting with one woman before marrying another; he then continued his affair with the first. Comrade R's mother preferred his mistress to his wife and often invited her to visit their communal apartment. Comrade R himself was often rude to his wife and refused to buy their daughter a gift on a business trip to Leningrad. As a result of their constant bickering, Comrade R's wife temporarily left him three times in 1956 and then sued him for child support when he finally left her. By the time the party considered the case, Comrade R was unofficially married to a third woman. Party officials ruled that Comrade R's legal marriage was doomed, assigned him the blame, and approved his expulsion from the party. As argued in prior chapters, the Khrushchev-era Communist Party was becoming less repressive, but more intrusive: it was devoting less time to the political loyalty and ideological orthodoxy of its members and more to the minutiae of their private lives. A thirty-year-old veterinarian in the party for three years, Comrade R was not accused of political unorthodoxy, corruption, or a poor record at work. Instead, his fellow Communists criticized him in personal, 1

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even petty terms, calling him an "egoist" and a "mama's boy" (mamen'kii synok). Unlike other Communists accused of sexual misconduct, Comrade R was not accused of drunkenness (which could hurt his work) or failing to pay child support (which was against the law). His case would therefore have been unusual just a decade earlier and unlikely in the years before World War II. Although party leaders of the 1930s often received letters from women seeking help obtaining child support from their husbands,3 and although a Communist's personal life could become intertwined with charges of disloyalty during the purges, 4 it was only under Khrushchev that the preservation of families "for the sake of the child" became a goal of the party discipline system. Comrade R's story was thus part of a larger trend in Soviet history, a curtailment of the personal privacy of citizens that has been highlighted by scholars like Oleg Kharkhordin, Deborah Field, and Brian LaPierre. 5 Even so, there was more going on in Comrade R's case than a simple Khrushchev-era rethinking of the bounds of private life. To begin with, the party's growing interest in the family actually predated Joseph Stalin's death and was part of a broad postwar trend: after the promulgation of a restrictive 1944 law that tightened the country's rules on child support and divorce, local party organs were increasingly called upon to hear the cases of Communists who had abandoned their children. 6 Just as importantly, cases like Comrade R's were also shaped by a seemingly unrelated trend-the regime's purported efforts to abandon "coercion'' in favor of "persuasion" and to redefine the methods by which bad Communists would be punished for their misdeeds. As the post1953 regime ratcheted up its rhetoric against hooliganism and social disorder, it could no longer resort to the repressive methods of the past, such as mass expulsions from the party. The regime therefore felt the need to seek out new methods of enforcing its behavioral norms, including a new emphasis on the use of education and persuasion (vospitanie). These efforts became apparent early in the post-Stalin era and culminated around 1959 in the campaign to rally "the public" (obshchestvennost) against wrongdoers and to mobilize everyday citizens against "antisocial acts" through the work of collective organizations like the party, the Komsomol, and comrades' courts. Rather than directly imposing its will from above, the party would encourage its members to discipline each other informally, often through intrusive efforts at mutual policing/ These invasive new tactics were supposedly based on persuasion rather than compulsion but in many ways represented a new attempt at coercion-one that was to be driven by rank-and-file Communists and not imposed by the police and high-ranking officials. By the 1950s, then, two models of party discipline competed in the minds of Communists: a traditional, hierarchical model based on censure and expulsion, and a newer model that called on individual party members to reform their personal habits and take the initiative in policing their comrades' behavior. These two models of party discipline came into particularly stark relief when

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they confronted issues related to everyday life (byt), 8 especially family life (the subject of this chapter) and drunkenness (the subject of chapter 6). This chapter will analyze the regime's evolving vision of how Communists should behave within their families during the twenty years after the war. Change began even before the death of Stalin: after the announcement of the 1944 family edict, local party organs faced a growing number of complaints from abandoned women and gradually became more likely to discipline Communists who refused to pay child support; in a postwar landscape full of absentee fathers and shattered families, party organs grudgingly used censure and expulsion as tools to ensure that Communists met their financial obligations to their offspring. 9 Then, beginning after Stalin's death, the leadership responded to growing worries about hooliganism and juvenile delinquency by championing the spread of "Communist morality" and proclaiming that everyday life was not "a private matter:'10 This change began as a response to fears about the upbringing of a new generation of citizens in the less repressive era that followed 1953, but was accelerated by the party's changing vision of party discipline. Individual Communists and party committees were urged to intervene informally in the private affairs of their comrades, and party committees were encouraged to put moral education (vospitanie) ahead of exclusion and punishment in their formal misconduct proceedings. Comrade R, for instance, was only expelled after the repeated interventions of his comrades and the local leadership. Cases like his would have been possible in theory but unlikely in practice before 1945, but were now a regular feature of Soviet life. By one standard, these trends have a lot in common with events from earlier in Soviet history and elsewhere in Europe (where the spread of the welfare state was reshaping governments' attitude to the family)." After all, the regime's interest in everyday life had deep roots within the revolutionary movement. Journal articles of the 1950s often defended the claim that everyday life was "not a private matter" by citing prewar figures, like the poet Vladimir Maiakovskii and the educational theorist Anton Makarenko.'3 Several scholars, in fact, have noted the growing involvement of party and Komsomol organizations in their members' private lives at various points before the war, especially in the 192os.'4 But even though the party had periodically become involved in its members' family lives before 1945, its defense of the family as a source of social stability, its strong focus on the upbringing of children and youth, its insistence that party members intervene personally in the private lives of their comrades, and its widespread use of stigmatization and friendly persuasion represented a clear break with tradition. The journalist Maurice Hindus even declared the regime's changing postwar attitude toward the family "the most dramatic somersault in all Soviet historY:''5 If anything, the regime's new vision of proper behavior was too ambitious to be fully carried out. Many Communists were confused by the onslaught of new ideas about what it meant to be a good party member; others were 12

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unenthusiastic about delving into the intimate secrets of their comrades; still more used the existence of two rival concepts of party discipline as an opportunity to question or resist the local leadership's authority.' 6 Growing worries about social disorder and stringent new behavioral norms had driven party organs more deeply into the family lives of their members, but the regime's new model of party interventions was never fully put into practice-a fact that tells us as much about the limits and tensions inherent in the Khrushchev-era vision of the ideal Communist as it does about the party's role in the family.

Communism and Morality under late Stalinism On July 4, 1947, Pravda published a feuilleton dealing with the case of N. V. Zherdev, a railroad worker accused of abandoning several children by two ex-wives. When a prosecutor urged him to pay child support, he allegedly responded that "my former children, like my relations with my former wives, are in the sphere of my private life, in which you have no right to interfere"; a raikom secretary then refused to punish Zherdev or help his family, declaring that "the private life of Communists [was] outside the competence of the party bureau:' Men like Zherdev were all too common in the postwar USSR, Pravda suggested, and they needed to be sent a message: the party would intervene even within the sphere of "so-called 'private life"' to punish Communists who ignored their responsibilities to their children.'7 Zherdev's case represented the beginning of a change in Communist practices of party discipline. For decades, party ideologists had maintained that adultery and child abandonment were signs of personal selfishness, a violation of socialist collectivism, and a vestige of Russia's capitalist past.'8 No one denied that the party had the right to intervene in all aspects of a Communist's life, and the passage of new abortion and child support laws in the 1930s demonstrated the regime's growing interest in the family.' 9 Nevertheless, although Communists were sometimes expelled or censured if they failed to pay child support or engaged in especially egregious sexual misconduct, many party organizations were loath to involve themselves in intimate matters, and the vast majority of rank-and-file Communists of the 1930s had been free to live their personal lives largely as they saw fit! 0 The party's ambiguous prewar views of private life were apparent in Emelian Iaroslavskii's 1936 pamphlet on the responsibilities of a Communist. "Is the question how a Communist raises his children a personal matter?" Iaroslavskii asked, before providing the response "[b] oth yes and no:' Iaroslavskii noted that a Communist needed to "raise his children in a Communist spirit" and could not ban his children from the Pioneers or the Komsomol, but much of his discussion of family life was limited to issues of politics: for example, he wrote that a Communist should not marry a kulak or a NEPman (one of the wealthy businessmen of

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the 1920s). 21 Iaroslavskii largely ignored more fundamental questions connected to the upbringing of children, such as the need for Communists to form strong marriages and provide steady financial and moral support to their children. To be sure, prewar Communists could get into trouble for problems in their family life (especially in the 1920s), most often when politics entered the picture. The prewar Communist Party was unlikely to expel or reprimand a member merely because he had engaged in an extramarital affair, but it often viewed sexual dissoluteness as a sign of political corruption and "moral degeneracy" (moral'noe razlozhenie). In many cases, an official's cohabitation with a woman other than his wife was viewed as a sign that he lacked "modesty" (skromnost) and had begun drinking, womanizing, and embezzling state money instead of focusing on his job. (Until1953, as noted in chapter 4, party statistics lumped together expulsions for family misconduct, drinking, workplace offenses, and corruption in one category of offenses, a clear sign of how the party understood "moral degeneracy:') Although the party was unlikely to investigate extramarital affairs for their own sake, an affair could also lead to expulsion if it involved an "enemy of the people" or helped inspire another citizen to denounce one of the lovers to the authorities on a political charge. 22 At the same time, the party frequently cracked down on Communists from Central Asia who were accused of polygamy, bride-snatching, and other "feudal" rituals-a series of offenses the authorities generally ascribed to religious observance. A 1947 KPK report even linked the issues of corruption and feudalism in Central Asia, noting that certain Kazakh kolkhoz chairmen were so financially overburdened by the practice of polygamy that they were forced to support their many wives through embezzlement. 23 By the late 1940s, however, two larger forces were chipping away at these lenient prewar attitudes: World War II had thrown the Soviet family into chaos, and a July 1944 edict had made divorce more difficult and child support requirements more stringent. The effects of war on the Soviet family were constantly highlighted in the party records of the day. "I got married in 1939;' explained a Communist who left his wife in 1943 and married another woman. "The war soon began, I was on the front, and my feelings toward my wife cooled off:' 24 Another man told the following story: "I was married before the army, but in the army I found out that my wife had married someone else. So I married another woman. She left me when I was demobilized. I married a third woman:' 25 Cases like these could have serious consequences: an administrator at Kalinin's traincar construction factory was censured and fired when it was learned that he had not returned to his wife after demobilization, for instance. 26 Still other Communists took advantage of the chaos of war to disappear from sight entirely, letting their wives think they had gone missing in action and marrying other women. 27 In all, over twenty-seven million Soviet citizens died in the war, creating a massive gender imbalance, threatening the country's birthrate, and leading to the passage of a strict Supreme Soviet edict on the family on July 8, 1944. 28

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As Mie Nakachi and other scholars have noted, the July edict was intended to raise the birthrate, primarily through two means: stabilizing existing Soviet families via stricter rules on divorce and using financial incentives to encourage potential mothers (both married and unmarried) to bear more children. Under the new divorce law, Soviet citizens were required to pay large fees, announce their divorce in the newspaper, and go through a difficult two-stage process. When it came to child support, the edict abolished the status of unregistered, common-law marriage, declaring that married men were responsible for children born in wedlock and that the state would support the rest. At the same time, the law's authors defended these changes (which were based in part on the assumption that the birthrate could only be increased if the rate of illegitimate births also rose) with paternalistic language emphasizing the new benefits that would accrue to Soviet mothers and with denunciations of married fathers who did not support their children financially. 29 As a result of the law, the number of divorces in the USSR plummeted from 198,400 in 1940 to 41,000 in 1948. 3° Facing tight new divorce regulations, many men took matters into their own hands, left their spouses, and married again illegally-hoping that they would receive a divorce if they could present their new family as a fait accompli. Just as importantly, the law's provisions on child support inspired thousands of women to sue their husbands for assistance. The resulting upsurge in men who could not divorce their wives and in women desperate to support their families soon began to affect the party discipline system, as local party committees received thousands of new complaints in an era when party rhetoric was demanding greater personal responsibility. An August 1946 case from Kazakhstan shows how the new system worked. Comrade M had left his wife and children shortly after the war; the obkom fired him from his job as a party official and reprimanded him in June 1946. A court rejected Comrade M's request for a divorce five days later, but he still refused to return home. His wife then wrote to the republican Central Committee, asking the party to "exert influence" on (vozdeistvovat' na) her husband and "return him to his familY:' (Comrade M, she wrote, was not providing their children with "material help:') When he refused to return home yet again, Comrade M was expelled from the partyY The outcome of this case was somewhat atypical: a majority of the men disciplined for their family problems were given a party reprimand and were not expelled. Nevertheless, the case followed a very common pattern. First, it involved a man who left his family for a woman he considered his second wife, even though the couple were not legally married. Second, disciplinary proceedings began with a complaint by the man's first wife, who wanted help convincing her husband to return home. (In other words, she usually said she wanted the party to save her family, not to punish her husband.) Third, the key issue was not the husband's "morality;' but his adherence to the 1944 family law and its provisions on divorce and (especially) child support.

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As this case shows, the wife's denunciation played a crucial role in the process. After 1944, women developed many strategies for obtaining child support payments: they went to court, complained to the police, and even tried to shame their ex-lovers by bringing the children to their husbands' workplaceY The party committee, however, was an especially popular target of complaints. One representative 1949 case describes an MGB worker who took up with a woman and had a child with her, but ended the relationship and "refused to participate in the child's upbringing:' The woman then wrote to his party organization, which convinced her ex-lover to pay child support. When the policeman quit paying a second time and moved to Orel, the woman wrote to the city's gorkom, which found him, called him to a meeting, and convinced him to resume payments.33 Party committees became involved in similar cases all across the country, censuring and expelling thousands of Communists or at least playing an informal role in urging Communists to return to their family. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to suggest that the regime had begun a mass crackdown on deadbeat fathers. Party committees were often sympathetic to the wives of irresponsible party members (or at least felt obligated to provide them with support), but they frequently gave accused Communists a second chance to prove themselves; moreover, they rarely expelled a man for family misconduct unless he combined his offense with another infraction or was a repeat offender. (If anything, the fact that mass expulsion and the purges were receding into the past-and that a denunciation was therefore less likely to lead to severe punishment for the offender-probably increased the number of women's complaints to the party.) 34 The party's involvement in family life was thus a natural outgrowth of the practice of petitioning the authorities for help, which expanded to fulfill new needs when the 1944 family edict tightened financial obligations for fathers, and although it took the form of a disciplinary hearing, it was intended less as a means of judging "immoral" Communists and more as a tool to convince Communist men to pay child support and obey the divorce law. Consider two 1947 cases from a primary party organization under the Soviet occupation of Germany. In the first, a woman wrote to the party to complain about the behavior of her husband, Comrade Z, who had begun living with another woman; Comrade Z, in turn, claimed that he had decided to end their marriage when his eleven-year-old son wrote him that a mysterious "Uncle Sergei" had begun hanging around the apartment, bringing chocolates to Comrade Z's wife, and taking her to the movies. 35 In the second case, Comrade I was accused of "entering into family life" with a young woman without divorcing his first wife. He, too, complained about his wife's infidelity.36 In each case, the PPO bureau accepted the accused Communist's claim that he was paying child support and refused to condemn anyone for unfaithfulness. The "amoral act" they objected to was bigamy, not infidelity: each man was reprimanded and

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ordered to "legally formalize his family situation;' although he was apparently free to choose which woman he wanted to live with. Party rhetoric bolsters the conclusion that the central issue in these cases was adherence to the law. When a local official from Molotov Province was accused of bigamy and child abandonment in 1948, for instance, one of his colleagues delivered a speech berating him for lawlessness: It is always strange to me when fathers abandon their children. [Comrade G]

should have stood for the defense of our laws on marriage and the family, but he abandoned his wife and his child, without annulling his marriage, and lives with another woman .... You, as a leader, should struggle for the upbringing of children, but in practice you have engaged in lawlessnessY Meanwhile, in February 1952, the party committee at Molotov's Dzerzhinskii Factory debated the fate of a Communist who had moved back and forth between two wives without getting divorced. "Why did you marry a second time without annulling your marriage, thereby committing a crime?" an indignant colleague asked. Another committee member was even more direct: "Bigamy is not allowed by the law;' he said, "and [Comrade N] concluded a second marriage without annulling his first, for which people are punished according to Soviet law:' 38 Nine months later, when the committee considered the case of a man who had left his wife after an unregistered marriage of fifteen years, it made this point yet again: "There are Soviet laws, and you need to observe them;' a committee member declared. 39 He very pointedly did not take the accused Communist to task for immorality or hedonism. On one level, the importance of lawfulness should not be surprising, given the importance oflaws like the 1947 theft decrees in shaping the party discipline system. Nevertheless, the 1944 family edict played a surprisingly explicit role in the sphere of party discipline. By contrast, the "lawlessness" of a Communist's actions seldom took center stage when he was accused of embezzlement or hooliganism. The party's new attitude toward its members went well beyond what the edict's authors had intended, however. As Nakachi has shown, one goal of the 1944 family law was to expand the population by increasing the number of illegitimate births, but this intention could not be stated explicitly (for obvious reasons); the law therefore only included one reference to single mothers, and its tough child support provisions for married fathers had a bigger impact on the popular consciousness. 40 Party officials often spoke out against Communists accused of fathering illegitimate children, making seemingly unobjectionable comments that nevertheless conflicted with the law's objectives, like "every man entering into cohabitation needs to feel that there could be consequences:' 4' Many women wrote to party organs demanding child support in cases where the law was not on their side-and the party sometimes censured their ex-lovers.

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In principle, the party had possessed the right to discipline the bigamists and deadbeat fathers within its ranks even before the 1944 family edict. In practice, that edict (coupled with the earlier edict of 1936 and the demographic chaos unleashed by the war) inspired more women to complain to the party about their wayward husbands and moved "unworthy behavior in family life" nearer the center of public discussion; as a result, local party organs became more heavily involved in supervising their members' family lives, as Vladimir Shlapentokh has suggestedY Statistics on this question are sparse, but support this conclusion: less than 3 percent of the expelled Communists who appealed their expulsion to the KPK were disciplined for family misconduct in 1945, compared to 7 percent in 1949, 9.12 percent in 1950, and 9.22 percent in 1951. 43 The result was a system in which party organs were not eager to investigate their members' private lives, but frequently did so at the behest of abandoned women, in order to ensure that Communist men were obeying the new divorce law and meeting their child support obligations. 44

Family and Party under Khrushchev: The Theory

In the years following 1953, Soviet society and politics experienced two changes that transformed the Communist Party's attitude toward everyday life. First, the death of Stalin made it possible to discuss long-standing social problems in more honest terms than had been possible for years. Newspaper articles began devoting their pages to attacks on "vestiges of capitalism'' like drunkenness, hooliganism, and child abandonment, and party leaders sent an unmistakable signal to the country's citizens that they needed to reform their personal behavior to meet the demands of"Communist moralitY:' 45 Second, the party leadership publicly repudiated the Stalinist "cult of personality;' proposing the rehabilitation of purge victims, discouraging party organs from expelling Communists, and emphasizing that party discipline was a tool to convince wayward Communists to change their ways, not just to punish or exclude them. These two messages may seem very different on a first glance, but they shared a focus on the concept of vospitanie, or moral education. In an era when Soviet leaders were quick to criticize the Stalin-era regime for imposing its will from above, the government sought both to mold its citizens into activists against the country's social problems and to shift the focus of its disciplinary system from exclusion and punishment to persuasion and education. Together, these two changes helped ensure that the party would play a more active but less formal role in shaping its members' family lives. The death of Stalin was quickly followed by the widespread public discussion of hooliganism, child abandonment, and other "vestiges of the past:' a trend that accelerated in the late 1950s and reached its peak at the party's TwentySecond Congress in October 1961. As Deborah Field points out, the Soviet

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publishing industry's annual catalogue of books in print created a new subject heading on "family and everyday life" in 1961, which saw a steady increase in new titles until reaching a high of seventy-three books in 1961. 46 Newspapers began increasing the publication of exposes about the drinking habits, sexual peccadilloes, and childrearing practices of the country's citizens as early as 1953; government printing houses released pamphlets with titles like Everyday Life Is Not a Private Matter, providing tens of thousands of workplace agitators with talking points to use when speaking to the general publicY A typical pamphlet explained that "the struggle for the cultivation [vospitanie] of the New Man is inseparably linked to the struggle against all vestiges of capitalism in everyday life;' which included alcoholism, apartment hooliganism, "a frivolous attitude toward marriage, unfounded and rash divorces, and sexual dissoluteness:' 48 This rhetorical campaign reached its height at 1961's Twenty-Second Congress, when Khrushchev announced the new Moral Code of the Builder of Communism, but it was a fact of life for the entire Khrushchev period. As other scholars have shown, Soviet leaders knew that some social problems were growing and that others were more serious than had been publicly acknowledged under Stalin, forcing them to devote greater attention to the norms of personal behavior. 49 During the Khrushchev years, then, party sources championed the idea that a Communist needed to be a good parent and spouse, not just a good worker and a good activist. In the summer of 1955, the Central Committee debated the text of a letter to party organizations "on serious insufficiencies in the upbringing of children'' -a document that exemplified the regime's rhetoric on obshchestvennost' and reiterated its new vision of a Communist's responsibilities. The letter praised the successes of the Soviet educational system, but decried the fact that Soviet youth in many cities had violated the public order and been accused of crimes like theft, hooliganism, and rape. The upbringing of Soviet youth, it declared, was "a matter not just for the school and the family, but for the entire Soviet public:'so Although the letter acknowledged that many parents raised their children well, it criticized "the fact that many parents, including party members, neglect their parental responsibilities" by failing to impart respect for labor, hurting the work of the school, or allowing their personal troubles to interfere with their children's upbringingY The letter added: A Communist should provide a good example in the upbringing of children. Party duty does not consist only in work responsibilities. . . . In the matter of raising children all parents, beginning with the minister and extending to the rank-and-file worker, have a single responsibility before the party and the state. Every Communist, worker or kolkhoznik, ... factory director or kolkhoz chairman, scientific worker or artist, should not only labor successfully, but should be a model family member and provide an example in the upbringing of children.... The Central Committee of the CPSU directs its attention to the fact that party organizations should judge workers not only based on their

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productive-public responsibilities, but also on how they raise their children and how they conduct themselves in the family, in the apartment, and in the dormitory. 52 The files of the Central Committee include only a draft of the letter, making it unclear if a version was ever sent out to party organizations. Nevertheless, every one of the letter's ideas became part of the conversation on the public role of the Communist, including the idea that each party member needed to be a role model in family life and needed to speak out against violations of public order and family lifeY By the Khrushchev years, in other words, party sources had begun to define a Communist's role in family life far more broadly than they had at the time of Emelian Iaroslavskii's 1936 pamphlet. In 1962, for example, the chairman of Smolensk's gorkom published an article in the journal Sem'ia i shkola describing his committee's decision that membership on a school "parents' committee" was an important party assignment akin to more traditional duties, like agitation and running a wall newspaper. 54 In 1964, the journal Partiinaia zhizn' published a letter from a PPO secretary asking whether he was worthy of that position, given that his son was a poor student who had just been expelled from the Pioneers. The journal claimed that to resign as PPO secretary would be "to leave active public work'' and told him not to do so, while agreeing that a Communist had a duty both to raise his children well and to provide an example to others. 55 Communists throughout the USSR were being told that the upbringing of children was an important public responsibility. Meanwhile, Khrushchev's repudiation of the excesses of Stalinism was beginning to reshape the party discipline system. As shown in previous chapters, the regime began to discourage party organs from expelling too many Communists-both by requiring a two-thirds vote of the PPO for expulsion and by publicly emphasizing the importance of "persuasion" over "coercion" in the party's work. A barrage of speeches and reports from high officials sent local authorities the message that expulsion was intended as a punishment oflast resort. The coincidence of these factors presented the regime with a challenge: if the party was downplaying the top-down imposition of its will, how could it enforce the "norms of socialist life"? After several years spent advocating greater emphasis on vospitanie in party work, Khrushchev eventually answered this question by calling for the mobilization of"public opinion" (obshchestvennoe mnenie) through the action of collective organizations. As Khrushchev told the Twenty-Second Congress, evil deeds are committed by people who, in a majority of cases, are members of one collective or another, one organization or another, members of profsoiuzy, the Komsomol, collective farms, cultural-educational unions and societies, and sometimes even members of our party. We need to actively use

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the moral weight and authority of society for the struggle with violators of the norms and rules of socialist communal life. 56 This approach would restore public order by mobilizing the public from below and stigmatizing the guilty among those who knew them best. As one pamphlet declared, "In every collective there should be created conditions of intolerance toward every violation of the moral code;' 57 whether those collectives were existing organizations (like the Komsomol or the party) or new vehicles for social change, such as comrades' courts or volunteer militias. 58 Signs of this approach became visible early in the Khrushchev years-for instance, with the rise of Komsomol crime patrols as early as 195459 -before rising in prominence with the campaign to rally obshchestvennost' and the passage of the Moral Code. 60 The technique of using "public opinion'' to reshape Communists' behavior was meant to look starkly different from the exclusionary tactics of the past. Official sources emphasized that "public opinion'' should reshape behavior through persuasion and education, not punishment and exclusion. To be sure, humiliation played a very real role in the process: one man accused of drunkenness complained, "to tell you the truth, if they had tried me in court, that would have been easier than to stand ten minutes 'in the circle"' (where he was lambasted by his comrades). 6' Other forms of collective intervention were meant to be less confrontational. One pamphlet explained that when the Communists in one factory learned that a colleague had been neglecting his son, they expressed just the right attitude by announcing, "we want to help you as Communists and friends:' 62 Another pamphlet argued that the goal of a "builder of socialism'' should not be to "judge a comrade, but to help him, to believe in him and in this way to awaken what is good and positive in everyone:' "But if these offenses become habitual;' it continued, "if the guilty does not want to listen to the voice of his friends, then it is their moral duty to take severe measures:' 63 In practice, the regime was calling on its members to be more active in the struggle with social disorder. "A real Communist cannot be indifferent to the existence of vestiges of the past, to antisocial acts and moods, whenever they appear;' one pamphlet announced; instead, a party member was expected to be a "fighter for a Communist everyday life:' 64 First, he or she was to provide a good example to other citizens both at work and at home; this role was largely taken for granted in party publications, however, since to do otherwise would be to admit that some Communists engaged in "antisocial acts:' More importantly, a Communist was meant to be a spokesman for the regime's values and to rally "public opinion'' against those whose behavior was a threat to public order, whether they were in the party or outside it. As the pamphlet continued, the "duty of every Communist" was "tireless, energetic activity ... for the education of every person in the spirit of Communist ideals"; a Communist could not "walk past even a single example of antisocial behavior" without protesting it. 65

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When the offender was a Communist, this model amounted to a less formal and more decentralized vision of party discipline. A 1961 article in the journal Agitator describes one representative case in which the wife of a factory worker named Nikol'tsev complained to the party committee that her husband's drinking was disrupting their family; several Communists then went to Nikol'tsev's apartment for "a cordial conversation over a cup of tea:' The result? Nikol'tsev quit drinking, and his wife quit scolding him for sending money home to his parents each month (a source of discord in the family). 66 A pamphlet tells the story of Leonid Nikolaevich, a Communist whose son Volodya was doing poorly in school. When the members of his party organization found out, they spent the majority of one of their meetings discussing the problem: they berated Leonid Nikolaevich for putting his dissertation ahead of his child, warned him that "it's your party duty to educate your son;' and brainstormed ways to help Volodya, ultimately deciding that the boy needed a hobby. When Leonid Nikolaevich started telling him about his work, Volodya developed a love of technology, began building models, and became an excellent student. 67 Communists, then, were urged to help their comrades mend their ways by discussing their conduct at party meetings and by engaging in friendly "chats" (besedy), though it is unclear just how "comradely" these conversations really were. 68 Party leaders acknowledged that informal disciplining would not always be enough to prevent misconduct, but they emphasized that when a formal disciplinary proceeding was needed, it should play an educational role both for the accused Communist and for other party members. Party hearings, in other words, would both humiliate the accused and send other Communists a lesson about their own private lives. These attitudes had a number of effects on the party. On one level, the regime's move away from Stalinist repression actually helped push it more deeply into the family, since informal interventions were better suited for confronting problems in a Communist's private life than, say, for rooting out embezzlement or unmasking dissent. But this model of enforcing the regime's social norms had another, more ironic effect: it implicitly downplayed the role of the party as a vanguard for the regime at a moment when Khrushchev hoped to reinvigorate it as an institution. 69 Party sources agreed that Communists should be among the leaders in the regime's efforts to fight "antisocial acts;' but they often downplayed the role of actual party organizations in this campaign, treating formal actions by the party almost as an afterthought in the regime's efforts/0 Emphasizing the role of party misconduct hearings in shaping the behavior of their members, after all, would hurt the party's reputation by drawing attention to the "amorality" of its members. Party propaganda was therefore much more likely to emphasize a Communist's personal role in correcting problems in the families of his non-party peers than it was to dwell on the party's institutional role in fighting problems in its members' families. Moreover, the regime often encouraged Communists to fight "antisocial acts" by joining a comrades' court

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or the druzhina-a fact that shifted the regime's emphasis toward non-party institutions. Many of the ambiguities of Khrushchev-era life helped to muddy the picture still further. It was not at all obvious that the country's Communists would be willing to take the initiative in combating social disorder, or that party committees would know when to give wrongdoers a friendly admonition and when to expel them. As Cynthia Hooper has shown, the party had sought to stifle criticism from within under postwar Stalinism;7' now it was asking Communists to begin criticizing anew. The results were sure to be unpredictable.

The Practice of Khrushchev-Era Party Discipline in the Family

The transformation of party discipline that followed Khrushchev's rise to power was simultaneously impressive and underwhelming. A growing number of Communists did begin urging their comrades to reform their personal lives, but in numbers far smaller than Khrushchev had hoped; a majority of family-related cases were still initiated by women seeking help from the party, and most of the Communists who did intervene in their colleagues' family lives were party secretaries, not rank-and-file Communists. The regime's propaganda championing "Communist morality" still had an impact, however. At a time when the expulsion rate was tumbling, the number of Communists expelled for family-related cases remained constant or even grew. Party organs began to focus on the general welfare of a Communist's children, not just on financial support, and to pursue new types of offenders, including men who abused their wives, women who broke up the families of their married lovers, and Communists of both genders who did a poor job raising their children. But even this change came with a price, by making party discipline more contentious and reinforcing the divide between party committees and the membership at large. The party succeeded in demonizing new types of misconduct, but it could not transform its members into citizen activists dedicated to fighting problems in the family. Two cases from Kalinin's train-car factory show both the continuities and the changes within the party's approach. The first case began in February 1956, when the bureau of one of the factory's PPOs heard a complaint from the wife of a local Communist, Comrade F. Months before, when the woman first asked for help, the party secretary had summoned Comrade F to discuss his behavior; he promised to change his ways and escaped without punishment. Now the woman said that she had left her husband, had moved in with her mother, and needed help getting her property back. She had recruited party leaders to adjudicate a bitter marital dispute.?• The result was an angry confrontation before the party bureau. Comrade F claimed that his wife was unfaithful and refused her a divorce/3 His wife announced that her marriage had always been troubled because of her husband's

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drinking and philandering. The party secretary then summarized his interactions with both spouses: I have developed the opinion that all the guilt in general lies with [Comrade F], and that the main cause of their arguments is his unworthy behavior. Now we need to ask-can he change his way oflife? You have a son, who studies in the tenth class. Now he faces a crucial moment. ... Your duty is to raise your son, lead him on a true path in life, the path of a worthy Soviet person.... We Communists are not indifferent to which path in life your son takes/4 The party bureau voted to censure Comrade F and referred his case to the full PPO. The couple reconciled before the PPO could assemble, however, giving the meeting a rowdy atmosphere. A few Communists denounced Comrade F as a womanizer (naming his lover for all to hear), but others criticized the party secretary for persecuting the accused Communist. "There was no attack on [Comrade F] from the party organization;' the secretary defensively announced, "but the party bureau often and in the correct time corrected him, when he strayed from the correct path:' The PPO softened Comrade F's decision to a milder reprimand, acting out of anger at the party bureau and relief that the couple had reconciled.7 5 This case highlights the new directions that Khrushchev-era party discipline had taken. First, it did not begin with a bid for child support, but with a request for mediation by a wife who was fed up with her husband; although women still initiated the party's involvement in most misconduct cases, they were increasingly diverse in their goals. Second, party secretaries had begun informally urging errant Communists to straighten out their personal lives, playing this role more often-the evidence suggests-than rank-and-file party members did. Third, the case still centered on the well-being of the couple's children, but with a broader definition of their welfare. Comrade F was not accused of denying his children "material help;' but of jeopardizing his son's future through philandering and family quarrels. Finally, cases of"unworthy conduct in the family" were proving more contentious than ever before. At nearly the same time, the factory was rocked by an even more divisive case, in which two Communists left their spouses, moved in together, and announced plans to marry. Comrade X, the male Communist, was a factory administrator with a wife and a college-aged son. Comrade Y, a worker in Comrade X's department, was married to a man who had left her and moved to Magnitogorsk. The affair between Comrades X and Y had lasted several years, but came to a head when Comrade X left his wife. He agreed to pay his son four hundred rubles a month and see him through a chronic illness. Both Communists asked their spouses for a divorce/ 6 The case began in November 1955, when a three-member commission reported to the Communists' PPO on the results of its investigation. The bureau

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then grilled both Communists about their behavior. Comrade Y claimed that her marriage had fallen apart when her husband "began to drink vodka and cause scandals"; her husband knew about the affair and only a lack of money had kept them from divorcing. Comrade X admitted that the squabbles that ended his marriage had resulted from the affair, hurting his credibility. Bureau members then asked both Communists whether their new union would be "a permanent and reliable marriage" 77 and all but accused Comrade Y of ending her lover's marriage. "Why couldn't you find someone else?" one bureau member asked. "A strange question;' Comrade Y answered. "I have strong feelings for him:' "Do you think it was right to break up a family?" another man asked. ''I'm not the only one guilty in this;' she replied. Another bureau member reported that Comrade Y's mother had warned her daughter to avoid Comrade X because he was "married, a family man:'7 8 The factory committee tried to judge the case by weighing the strength of each Communist's old marriage, the health of their new relationship, and the interests of each couple's children. "It is our task to express our attention and interest in the family;' one bureau member declared, urging Comrade X to be a good father to Comrade Y's daughter. Comrade X "did not act like a member of the party;' another declared. "We need to say to him, 'You're not a young person, you have a family, you should live with your family:" The bureau agreed that Comrade Y had "broken up" a strong marriage and decided, by a vote of seven to one, to reprimand both Communists/9 But all hell broke loose when the case went to the full PPO. The very first speaker demanded that Comrade X be expelled and attacked him for hypocrisy (since he had claimed that her son's criminal record was the result of family problems). Another woman praised Comrade X's wife and declared that Comrade X had "throw[n] aside his ill son and wife without means of existence, to please his petty animal passions:' The PPO narrowly voted to expel each Communist, although they seemed more intent on showing their unhappiness with the factory bureau than in showing their hatred of the "vestiges of capitalism:'so These cases were not isolated events: party organs throughout the USSR were becoming more assertive in investigating the family lives of Communists, even when child support was not an issue. Some cases involved men with grown children or no children at all. A 1956 case from Molotov Province resulted in the expulsion of a man who ignored repeated instructions from his party organization to end his "cohabitation" with a coworker, even though his two children had grown up. 8' Other cases involved childless adulterers who argued unsuccessfully for lenience because they did not have children,82 and still others expanded the party's notion of misconduct in other ways. In a 1953 case from the train-car factory, the party committee even voted to reprimand and fire a Communist who had moved to the city with his children from his first marriage but without his second wife; it announced that it was acting for the sake of the woman's stepchildren, who "considered her their mother:' 83 In short, in the years

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after 1953, party organizations became concerned with a broader concept of "unworthy conduct" than ever before and spent increasing amounts of time on intrusive investigations. In particular, Khrushchev-era party organizations began dealing with three types of family-related misconduct that their Stalin-era predecessors had never confronted to the same degree. The first type of misconduct was symbolized by the case of Comrade Y: more female Communists than ever before were expelled or reprimanded as home-wreckers who tore apart their lovers' families. Before 1953, party organs almost never investigated unmarried women who broke up their lovers' marriages, 84 but such cases became common under Khrushchev: in 1956 and 1957 alone, at least six women from Kalinin Province were expelled from the party for refusing to end their relationships with married men, and many more were reprimanded. 85 Each of these cases began when local party officials urged the woman to end her affair and resulted in a hearing when informal interventions failed. The Dzerzhinskii Factory in Molotov considered two such cases in 1957, beginning with a woman whose dormitory room was often visited by a married man. In her opening statement, she was quick to deny that she was a homewrecker: "When I met him he said that he did not live with his wife;' she said. "We wanted to live together but he didn't have a room .... His wife visited me and said she couldn't live with him as her husband:' The committee fired off a barrage of skeptical questions. "Did he visit you at the dormitory?" "How long did he stay?" "What kind of goal did he have?" The concluding question drove home the committee's attitude: "How would you feel, if you were in [the wife's] place?"86 The committee was more sympathetic to the couple in a second case, in which both lovers were Communists. The man made an impassioned plea to remain in the party, declaring that he and his first wife "did not have a real family-that is, there were no children'' and promising that he would have a "complete" and "strong" family with his new wife. 87 (This argument was conversant with the rhetoric of Communist morality, which claimed that it was wrong to marry without intending to have children.) 88 The woman was asked, first, if she had known that her lover was married, and second, why she had chosen to "interfere in his family life:' She denied that her lover had a real family and urged the committee to ask him about his marriage, leading her interrogators to attack her for changing the subject. Both Communists were censured. 89 The Communist Party's continuing interest in shaping the next generation of citizens was apparent in another group of cases, in which party organs investigated Communists whose behavior threatened the upbringing of their children. If nothing else, the Khrushchev-era party was always more likely to punish Communists whose behavior hurt their offspring. (In March 1956, for instance, the KPK confirmed the expulsion of a man whose seventh-grade son had gone to school drunk after the father quit paying child support.) 90 At the same time, many party organs were inching toward a policy that Soviet jurists had debated

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for years: holding Communists responsible for the crimes of their children. 9' A typical case from the Siberian city ofStalinsk resulted in three years of hearings, delving into the troubled marriage of two Communists whose son had been convicted of hooliganism for the second time. The boy's mother was declared "the initiator of the scandals in the family" and told to "change her self-loving and egotistical character;' while the husband-a factory director-was excoriated for his frequent extramarital affairs and for failing to stop his other children from mocking the boy as a "jail-bird" (tiuremshchik). Party officials were especially critical of the husband for failing to help his son after he returned from the Gulag after his first hooliganism conviction. The man had found his son work at the factory, talked to him in detail about his life, and even wrote him lengthy letters when he was away from home, but as a party investigator wrote, "although these letters were extremely rich in content and had great educational meaning for the son, Comrade L overrated their importance and did not take more energetic measures, explaining that his son was already grown up:' 92 The Kalinin train-car factory's party organization never investigated this type of case in the late Stalin years, but it pursued three such cases after 1954. In one, a couple whose son had been convicted of banditry were reprimanded and told to "regulate their family relations in conjunction with the demands of Soviet morality"; a year later, the father was censured again for causing scandals at home, "which speaks negatively about the upbringing of his 8-year-old son:' 93 In a second case, from 1955, the party censured a party propagandist when it learned that her eighth-grade son had disrupted his classes and earned poor grades. After trying repeatedly to get the mother involved, the party threatened to expel her if she could not control her son. 94 When the son raped a schoolgirl and ran away from home, the committee reprimanded her again and fired her. 95 Similar cases appeared throughout the country. Cases involving the upbringing of children focused on several issues. They often began with the child's criminal conviction, frequently touched on grades and schooling, and sometimes discussed the father's tendency to leave firearms at home unattended. 96 (Strikingly, Khrushchev-era cases almost never concerned the political loyalty of Soviet youth and their attraction to Western culture, usually dealing instead with charges of hooliganism and other violent crimes.) 97 But, like cases involving "other women;' investigations of the parents of delinquents were pursued inconsistently and highlight the system's limits. Three couples at Kalinin's train-car factory were reprimanded when their children committed crimes in the late 1950s, but none at the Dzerzhinskii Factory were. The result, presumably, was to leave some Soviet parents feeling harassed and humiliated, while reminding others to get their family lives in order before they too faced the party's wrath. Even the propagandist from Kalinin-whose case began before her son's conviction-was not expelled from the party. Khrushchev-era party committees also began to launch more frequent investigations of a final type of misconduct: spousal abuse. During the 1940s,

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Communists were rarely disciplined for beating their wives, even in cases when their victims were hospitalized, except when they had committed a second offense as well-usually when they had a history of hooliganism or drunkenness.98 Spousal abuse cases differed from child support cases in an important respect: women were largely unwilling to accuse their husbands, especially early in the postwar period. (Instead, cases involving wife-beating often began with a complaint from the victim's mother or occasionally from reports by neighbors.)99 Most evidence, in fact, suggests that everyone-including both wives and party officials-was willing to overlook spousal abuse. In 1950, the obkom in Voronezh expelled a man who had been sentenced to three years in jail for beating his wife's head with a lock and pouring acid on her face. The man's party testimonial, written by the raikom secretary, actually noted that he had beaten his wife in the past and threatened her if she told anyone-suggesting that some in the party had known about his savagery and that his violent acts could have been avoided. 100 Spousal abuse cases began to come into the open in the Khrushchev years, becoming part of society's larger discussion about childrearing and the stability of the family. Many cases involved men whose "bestial" (zverskii) treatment of their wives threatened the upbringing of their children. In a 1960 case from Kalinin province, the obkom expelled a man who beat his wife, caused constant scandals at home, and even used "uncensored words" in front of the kids. 10' In 1957, a newspaper in Molotov sparked a party investigation of a Communist who had hit his wife several times in the head in public in the presence of their daughter, and then went after her with a knife when they got home. "The constant drinking and debauchery engaged in by [the Communist] was also reflected in his children;' the newspaper announced, noting that the man's behavior had traumatized his three-year-old son.' 02 When the kolkhoz party organization discussed the case, it chose-contrary to the usual practice-to call his wife as a witness. She confirmed the story, noting that her son had quit talking after witnessing her abuse and later began speaking with a strong stammer. Her husband was expelled by his obkom for drinking, beating his wife, and an "incorrect attitude" toward his children. 103 These cases were part of a larger trend: the Tver' train-car factory and Molotov's Dzerzhinskii Factory heard at least one wife-beating case each year after 1954, but very few before 1953. Typical Communists expelled for spousal abuse included a policeman who beat his wife in front of her coworkers at the local cafeteria'04 and a kolkhoz driver who frequently beat his wife and sent her running to the neighbors for help. 105 It was not uncommon for a man to beat both his wife and another relative, such as his mother-in -law. 106 Cases of wife-beating skirted the line between cases of family misconduct and cases of drunkenness-the subject of chapter 6. They apparently became more common in the 1950s as worries about public disorder grew and as the courts began to direct their attention to a new type of violent crime, so-called

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"domestic hooliganism:'' 07 Even in the Khrushchev years, wife-beating cases were most likely to arise when they threatened the well-being of a child or when they were part of a larger pattern of drunkenness that had other negative consequences. Many women did not want their husbands to be expelled from the party, leading them to deny allegations of spousal abuse or to ask the party to give their husbands a lesser punishment. In a 1957 case from Omsk Province, a mechanic was accused of drinking systematically and beating his wife, but the wife denied the charges, saying that they "lived well and without scandals:'108 Some wives undoubtedly refused to accuse their husbands out of fear, while others suffered from battered wife syndrome or were afraid that their husband's expulsion from the party would hurt his career and thereby harm the whole family. Many also knew about the skeptical attitude of a number of party committees. In 1956, for example, a party organization at a school in Molotov considered the case of a gym teacher whose mother-in-law accused him of beating his wife. Everyone agreed that he had committed a serious offense, but many Communists were inclined to give their friend the benefit of the doubt and to praise his skills as a teacher. "His wife is also guilty of much;' one party member declared. "She does not work, she doesn't care about her family, she left him six times and returned six times:' 109 Party organs were more likely to investigate charges of wife-beating than they had ever been before, but the reticence of many wives and the lack of enthusiasm among many Communists limited the frequency and scope of party investigations. That lack of enthusiasm represented a final failure of the party discipline system: it was far easier for the regime to demonize new types of wrongdoing than it was to mobilize individual Communists to denounce their peers and comrades for misbehavior in the family. Many party records refer to past "conversations" (besedy) involving a Communist having family problems, the party secretary, and perhaps another bureau member (say, a factory's main engineer), while others refer to informal meetings between an accused Communist and the raikom.uo Party records rarely refer to interventions by agitators or rankand-file Communists, however, suggesting that "conversations" with a guilty Communist were not seen as acts of friendly, comradely concern, but as unwelcome pressure from the boss. Moreover, many hearing transcripts suggest that rank-and-file Communists knew of a comrade's family problems, but refused to intervene. In a case from the Dzerzhinskii Factory, a speaker noted that although the organization had received denunciations describing a Communist's extramarital affairs, "his wife did not complain about him and we did not discuss him at a meeting:'m In a tragic case from the Perm' countryside, many local Communists admitted that they had known that one of their comrades was a heavy drinker who abused his children, a boy and girl who wore rags and frequently ran away from home. "When I lived on Labor Street, it was often possible to see Comrade E and his wife drunk;' one Communist recounted, while another told the accused that "the whole settlement knew about your attitude

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toward your children:'m Nevertheless, no one acted until the local newspaper published an expose denouncing the man's negligence and cruelty. Ultimately, then, the political transformations of the Khrushchev era seem to have resulted in an increased oversight role for factory supervisors and party officials, in dramatic qualitative changes in how the party defined the Communist's role in the family, and in more ambiguous quantitative changes in the party discipline system. Party statistics on "unworthy conduct in family life" are unusually difficult to parse. One set of statistics hints at the growing number of postwar party discipline cases involving "unworthy conduct in everyday life": the proportion of these cases (which included both drunkenness and family issues) rose from 2 percent from 1942 to 1945 to 5.6 percent between 1946 and 1948 and 7.7 percent between 1949 and 1951, when the total number of annual expulsions averaged around 7,500 a year. 113 Most expulsion statistics from before 1953 combine family misconduct, drunkenness, and corruption into one broad category of offenders, however, and even Khrushchev-era statistics do not differentiate between expulsions for drunkenness and expulsions for child abandonment or sexual misconduct-making the issue difficult to track. Nevertheless, the expulsion rate in cases involving a broader category of "unworthy behavior in everyday life" appears to have remained constant or risen slightly in the years after Stalin died, even at a time when the overall expulsion rate was plummeting. The number of cases involving a Communist's personal life appear to have held up unusually well during the Thaw, remaining roughly constant in absolute numbers and growing as a percentage of the party's work at a time when expulsions for most other offenses were on the decline. Nevertheless, as the preceding pages have suggested, the party's involvement in the family went well beyond expulsion cases. Consider events at Perm's Dzerzhinskii Factory. Between 1954 and 1961, the factory's party committee heard family misconduct cases involving twenty-two individual Communists, expelling six and censuring sixteen more (out of a total of roughly one thousand).114 This represented a sharp increase in the total number of cases (only four Communists had been disciplined for family problems between 1945 and 1949), but still represented a small absolute number. 115 By one measure, then, the local party was intervening in the family lives of a small percentage of its members each year-something like 1 in 333, or 0.3 percent. The total appears substantially higher when viewed from another perspective, however: roughly 1,400 people appear to have belonged to the factory party organization at some point between 1954 and 1961, which suggests that around one in every sixty of the factory's Communists were disciplined for family misconduct during this period. (Most Communists at the factory probably knew someone who had been accused of unworthy conduct, took part in a misconduct hearing, or heard rumors of cases from other workshops.) Moreover, the number of party reprimands for "unworthy conduct in the family" rose steadily at both the Dzerzhinskii Factory and Kalinin's train-car factory-a trend that was almost

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TABLE 18 -Expulsions for "Unworthy Conduct in Everyday Life," 1954-1964 YEAR

FULL MEMBERS EXPELLED (%OF ALL EXPULSIONS)

1954

8,392 (12.41 %)

1955

7,734 (28.27%)

1956

7,736 (27.70%)

1957

7,865 (25.88%)

1958

9,741 (27.92%)

1959

9,271 (27.39%)

1960

5,927 (25.65%)

1961

8,015 (25.58%)

1962

8,371 (24.93%)

1963

8,961 (24.35%)

1964

8,182 (23.70%)

RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 9, II. 20, 69; d. 10, II. 5, 65, 131; d. 11, II. 5, 63, 124; d. 12,115, 54, 158,217.

certainly at play throughout the USSR. Official statistics did not track the number of reprimands meted out by party organizations-and no official document traces a final form of party interference. Informal "conversations" between a Communist and a party committee are frequently mentioned in party records, but rarely made it into official documents unless the case eventually resulted in a disciplinary hearing. Comrade R, the veterinarian whose case introduced this article, had been called in for at least five such "conversations" before his formal disciplining; many party secretaries ended up acting as de facto marriage councilors, as Comrade F, the train-car worker described earlier in this chapter, could attest. The "conversation;' in fact, seems to have been a frequent and underappreciated tool of the Khrushchev-era Communist Party in shaping the attitudes of the population at large. The regime's Khrushchev-era rhetoric on the family, then, gave local party organs a longer list of targets and a broader definition of wrongdoing, but could not mobilize Communists as thoroughly as the party's rhetoric had promised. The regime was most successful in stigmatizing a broader array of wrongdoers and sending a message that it was serious about ensuring the stability of Soviet families; the number of wrongdoers urged to mend their ways in "conversations" with other Communists also seems to have grown, perhaps most of all in factories and other workplaces with a strong party presence. Even so, many

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of those informal interventions were carried out by party secretaries (or party committees), not by rank-and-file activists, and most cases were initiated by women who had been wronged by a Communist (usually her husband), not by concerned citizens. Instead of mobilizing the party membership from below, the regime had empowered the local leadership to intervene in a wider range of cases, often in ways that accentuated the divide between the leaders and the rank-and-file. The regime, in short, was better at pushing local party organs more deeply into the family than at changing the ways that individual Communists viewed their responsibilities to society.

Party Discipline and Family Life after World War II In his book The Collective and the Individual in Russia, Oleg Kharkhordin argues that the Khrushchev era witnessed the "profound consolidation of what many Western commentators call 'social control' and 'social pressure;" dramatically curtailing personal privacy via a complex system of mutual surveillance. "The disciplinary grid became faultless and ubiquitous;' he writes; "any degree of freedom in private was to be paid for by an inescapable participation in the mutual enforcement of unfreedom and humiliation in public:'u6 Many writings of the period suggest that this was, indeed, the intention of high-level officials. When it endorsed the work of comrades' courts and other collective organizations, for example, one pamphlet explained that "public action differs from administrative or legal action in that it can be achieved methodically, daily, because each person is watched over by tens, or hundreds, of attentive, friendly eyes:'117 The examples cited in this chapter suggest that family privacy did decline significantly in the postwar USSR, but not in the way that the party leadership had hoped. Some Communists did intervene informally in the personal lives of their comrades, but they seem to have been a distinct minority of party members; many misconduct hearings made it clear that other Communists had known about the wrongdoing of their comrades for months or years, but had done nothing about it. When they did get involved, party members do not seem to have been motivated by the goal of eliminating "vestiges of capitalism;' instead speaking in more mundane, less ideological terms and seeking to use formal misconduct hearings to air their grievances about their enemies or the local leadership. (I have come across only one Communist who used the phrase "vestige of capitalism" at a disciplinary hearing, in the case of Comrades X and Y, suggesting that not all party members had fully internalized the language of the regime.) 118 Some Communists even complained to the press about the party's lack of seriousness. "Communists' reports on the work they have done are often discussed at party assemblies;' wrote a disgruntled Lithuanian woman. "But only rarely do we have a conversation about the behavior of a Communist

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in the family, about the responsibility of a Communist -a father or a motherin the upbringing of children:'u9 In other words, although the Khrushchev-era regime succeeded in intensifying a series of trends in party discipline that had begun under Stalin, it was not able to transform the behavior of the country's Communists or to fully redefine the role of a Communist in everyday life. The regime's growing concerns about hooliganism and the youth problem followed closely on its worries about the birthrate; the fact that family cases under late Stalinism had been more concerned with convincing Communists to reform themselves than with punishment and exclusion allowed the party's pursuit of bigamists and deadbeat dads to grow in intensity under Khrushchev, at a moment when investigations of other forms of misconduct were declining. This trend would continue in the years that followed: the overall expulsion rate began growing again under Brezhnev, and party interventions in the family continued until199I. 120 Ironically, then, the party leadership never achieved its goals when it came to the family. There is no evidence that the authors of the 1944 family law hoped to draw party committees more deeply into family life, but by creating new child support rules and making divorce more difficult, they opened up a window for women to petition the party when their husbands failed to live up to their responsibilities. As a result, local party organs took on an unwanted new role in the family. Then, under Khrushchev, party leaders hoped to get individual Communists to become "fighters for a Communist everyday life" who would use stigmatization and friendly persuasion to convince their comrades to become better husbands, wives, parents, and citizens. But the resulting system of informal discipline was never "daily" or "methodical;' the party's leadership's utopian goal of transforming the consciousness of the population remained out of reach, and formal party interventions became more intrusive without becoming an effective means of changing the behavior of the party membership. The party's Khrushchev-era involvement in the family was beautifully summarized by a 1957 sentence from Ivanovo's newspaper, discussing the case of a local Communist: "The gorkom, Soviet organizations, and even the neighbors all participated in [deciding] the fate of the family;' the newspaper wrote, "but nothing helped:'' Party leaders had hoped to transform both the behavior of party members and the means by which their conduct would be judged; they wanted to defend public order and secure the future for a new generation, without resorting to the Stalinist tactics of the past. What they accomplished, however, was the consolidation and expansion of practices that had their roots earlier in Soviet history, especially in the turmoil that followed World War II. The Communist Party had invaded the family, but without the results that its leadership wanted. 21

CHAPTER SIX

"We Talk a Lot, but Take Very Few Measures" The Party's Struggle with Drunkenness among Its Members

0

M A R c H 2 o , 1 9 5 6 , the party organization of a mine in Molotov Province debated the case of Comrade U, a Tatar man accused of "habitual drunkenness" (sistematicheskoe p'ianstvo). Comrade U's case, like many others concerning alcohol abuse, combined allegations of drunkenness with charges of violating labor discipline: Comrade U had been reprimanded by the party for drunkenness and absenteeism five months before, but he nevertheless missed work because of his heavy drinking twice in January, once in February, and twice more in March. Comrade U's disciplinary record extended back even further, however. His employer had denied him pay in May 1955 for leaving work early and had given him two simple reprimands, two severe reprimands, and a warning for drunkenness and absenteeism; his PPO had voted to expel him from the party in September 1955, but the gorkom had changed this punishment to a reprimand. Comrade U had also been summoned to his PPO to discuss his behavior and had been visited by workplace party leaders for informal "conversations" (besedy) about his drinking.' When Comrade U's PPO met in March 1956, its secretary had run out of patience, setting the hearing's tone in his opening remarks: N

As the secretary of the party organization, I have had to trouble myself with Comrade U many times. Literally almost every week Comrade U does something-first absenteeism, then he collapses drunk, then women complain about him, then he's written about in the city newspaper. He repeatedly gave me his word that he would reform. He gave his word at the bureau and at the party meeting, but he does not keep his word. I believe that we have convinced and educated him enough, but he is an incorrigible person and his behavior discredits the title of a Communist. Undoubtedly, these people have no place in the ranks of the Communist Party.> Even Comrade U recognized that he was out of excuses. He admitted that he "had not kept [his] word or justified the trust of the party;' and when asked what he wanted, he replied, "I don't care. The Communists won't believe me:' 3 The PPO, gorkom, and obkom all endorsed his expulsion from the party.

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During the postwar era, party discipline cases involving alcohol focused on a handful of issues that were prominently featured in Comrade U's case. Party organs rarely concerned themselves with drinking in isolation: most interventions came about when a drunken Communist violated labor discipline, committed an act of hooliganism, or (as the party entered the Khrushchev era) engaged in drunken behavior that harmed his family. Party members accused of drunkenness were often repeat offenders, whose drinking was frequently linked to other misdeeds. Like parallel anti-drinking efforts by other institutions (such as newspaper feuilletons, the prosecution of hooligans, and administrative sanctions at work), the party's pursuit of heavy drinkers was intended both to help achieve the regime's economic goals and to change the habits and attitudes of individual Communists. Party discipline cases involving drunkenness therefore had a lot in common with cases involving the family, as discussed in chapters: they involved a growing realization that the everyday behavior of Communists was "not a private matter" and were closely linked to the Khrushchev-era campaign to rally obshchestvennost' against the country's social problems. If anything, however, the party's struggle with drunkenness was even more central to the regime's vision of the ideal Communist. After all, the issue of drunkenness cut to the heart of the Communist Party's system of internal discipline. Party discipline was based on a shifting balance of several competing goals-the imposition of control from above, the purging or punishment of the unworthy, and the spread of the regime's values. Drunkenness cases were connected to the first of these objectives because they highlighted the regime's desire to ensure the reliability and effectiveness of its agents and representatives-a goal that was especially prominent in the late Stalin years. The party's second goal-purging the ranks of the undeserving-was often made clear by the language used at hearings. (Like many hard-drinking Communists, Comrade U was attacked by colleagues as "a dirty stain [griaznoe piatno] upon the party organization:') 4 Over time, however, the disciplinary system's third goal-education and persuasion-increased in importance, leading one of Comrade U's interrogators to announce, "it's well known that every party meeting is a school of vospitanie:' 5 As shown below, the regime's vision of moral reform and vospitanie resulted in a clear tension between punishment and persuasion in many party discipline cases, whose efforts to stigmatize drunkenness were often more punitive than the official rhetoric on moral education might suggest. The tension between punishment and persuasion also weakened the party's approach to the alcohol problem, enabling Communists to let their comrades off the hook for serious misconduct when they promised-however insincerely-to change their ways. Drunkenness cases, after all, dealt with a behavior that was eminently reformable, if the accused Communist received the right combination of punishments and incentives. But the party discipline system was poorly suited for the struggle with alcoholism. Party leaders were often willing to act leniently toward a Communist who "sincerely recognized" his mistakes, but they typically had

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no understanding of how a hard-drinking Communist could change his ways: until the mid-1950s, for instance, misconduct hearings almost never used the words "treatment" or "alcoholism" and largely treated drunkenness as a failure of willpower. As Comrade U's case showed, an insincere Communist (or an alcoholic unable to change his ways) could avoid expulsion for years by promising to reform, without actually getting the help he needed. The party's mission of vospitanie, then, could interfere with the system's other goals, like maintaining regime control over party members and excluding unworthy Communists from the ranks, by giving party organs an excuse to forgive their members. The process of disciplining Communists accused of drunkenness was seriously flawed from the outset. As a result, the regime's anti -alcohol efforts failed to rein in drunkenness among party members. Before 1953, the party's efforts to crack down on heavy drinking were closely linked to its desire for greater discipline in the workplace. But, in a pattern that recurred throughout the postwar era, party officials' desire to convince hard -drinking Communists to reform interfered with their goal of ensuring a disciplined party membership, since they were too willing to believe in the redemptive power of party discipline and to forgive Communists who promised to reform. The result was a culture of permissiveness toward alcohol. Then, when the regime began to confront hooliganism and social instability more seriously in the Khrushchev years, many party organs began to change their approach. They began to discuss alcoholism as a social and medical problem, not merely as a matter of personal discipline, and quizzed hard-drinking Communists about how their drinking affected their families. They also sought to play up the importance of vospitanie even further and to mobilize individual party members as activists against social disorder as part of the campaign to rally obshchestvennost'. The party's approach to drunkenness proved as ineffective under Khrushchev as it had under Stalin, however. Part of the problem was a contradiction in the regime's vision of drunkenness: although party leaders increasingly recognized that alcoholism was a serious medical problem, they still sought to eliminate drunkenness by stigmatizing heavy drinkers and urging them to show greater willpower. Moreover, the Soviet drinking culture was so entrenched that many Communists resisted the party's call for a "struggle with drunkenness:' The result was an unworkable system, combining the intrusiveness of a Big Brother state with the ineffectiveness of an out-of-touch bureaucracy. Try as it might, the regime could never translate its tough rhetoric about alcohol into a new attitude among Communists, and its efforts highlighted the declining relevance of party discipline in Soviet life.

Drinking and Drunkenness in the USSR and the Communist Party

From the moment it took power in 1917, the Soviet regime was forced to tackle a serious alcohol problem that had plagued Russia for centuries. The

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regime's response, both before and after World War II, was ambivalent, erratic, and sometimes even hypocritical. 6 The early Soviet government inherited both a state vodka monopoly and a thriving temperance movement from its tsarist predecessors. It at first continued the wartime government's policy of prohibition before bowing to financial pressure and resuming alcohol sales; when workers' alcohol consumption reached prewar levels in the late 1920s, the regime launched a new anti-drinking campaign and started a state-sponsored Society for the Struggle Against Alcoholism, but the state temperance society was abolished in the 1930s and anti-alcohol efforts took the back burner once again.? The regime's anti-alcohol fervor ebbed and flowed from then until the collapse of the USSR. Party propagandists denounced drunkenness as a "vestige of capitalism" and an "uncultured" behavior that weakened economic productivity and threatened the country's path to radical social transformation, 8 but party leaders recognized that many citizens (and many Communists) drank heavily, centered their leisure time and their masculine identity around alcohol, and would resist efforts to change their behavior. Moreover, the state itself depended on the alcohol industry for revenue. By World War II, in short, the regime's vision of ideal behavior for both Communists and everyday citizens was anti-alcohol in theory but erratic in practice, in part because of widespread opposition from a hard-drinking public. In fact, many scholars have argued that the Soviet attitude toward alcohol was defined by the coexistence of two rival cultures: an official culture that denounced drunkenness as backward and an unofficial culture that celebrated heavy drinking. 9 Popular Russian drinking culture was especially strong among workers. It emphasized high-proof alcohol, treated large numbers of different events as occasions for drinking, defined the consumption of large quantities of liquor as a crucial ingredient of manliness and male sociability, and was often linked to the culture of the workplace (for example, through transmission from older factory workers to younger laborers).' 0 The Russian drinking culture was popular among nearly every demographic group, but was especially prevalent among peasants and workers and was relatively less popular among women. (Female alcoholics were often publicly stigmatized for violating their expected gender roles.)n Heavy drinking, in short, became a centerpiece of workplace cohesion and a site of class identity for proletarians, helping to shape the self-conception of Communists even when the Soviet regime began to denounce drunkenness as a "vestige of capitalism:' As a result, it was not uncommon for prewar Communists to be expelled for drunkenness. Kate Transchel notes that habitual drinking became a "common cause" for expulsion in the 1920s, especially in the aftermath of recruitment drives that expanded the party's size and diluted its base of workers; ironically, drunkenness was often seen as a "bourgeois" activity as the party sought to re-proletarianize its ranks and purge itself of"drunks, hooligans, and other class enemies:' Broader party statistics provide a mixed picture on the question of prewar expulsions for alcohol abuse. In the 1921 party purge, for example, 12

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n percent of all expelled Communists were excluded from the party for "drunkenness, scandal [beschinstvo], and rudeness [gruboe obrashchenie] :· while in 1933, 13 percent of expelled Communists had been disciplined because they were "degenerate in a moral or everyday respect" (a category that includedbut was not limited to-party members accused of drunkenness).' 3 Pre-war expulsions for drunkenness were most likely during one of the regime's periodic anti-alcohol campaigns; they often featured class-based language that had almost entirely vanished from alcohol cases by the late 1940s, such as references to "class enemies" and descriptions of drunkenness as a bourgeois transgression. The main remnants of this discourse after the war were a tendency to refer to the alcohol problem as a "survival of capitalism" or a sign of "moral and everyday degeneration;' but postwar party organs seem to have been less likely to view hard-drinking Communists as "alien elements" who needed to be purged. Transchel, moreover, suggests that prewar drunkenness cases often targeted victims who were instead guilty of other varieties of misconduct, sometimes resulting in the sudden expulsion of Communists who lacked a prior history of alcohol-related misconduct. '4 The party's expulsion of hard-drinking Communists was often resisted by the rank-and-file, both before and after the war. During the 1920s, as David Hoffmann has shown, many Communists accused of drunkenness defended themselves by saying that they had been socializing with other Communists and that only party members who drank with class enemies should be disciplined.'5 This was an early sign that many Communists viewed heavy drinking as a natural part of male sociability. After World War II, by contrast, most Communists publicly acknowledged and endorsed the party's campaign against drunkenness, whatever their personal feelings on the subject, and knew that they needed to speak out against alcohol abuse. In all likelihood, however, a majority of Communists either opposed or disliked the party's anti-drinking stance even then. The postwar press is full of articles criticizing men for viewing drunkenness as a sign of masculinity: for instance, a 1954 Komsomol'skaia pravda article denounced a group of hard-drinking young men from Voroshilovgrad, noting, "neither Vladimir Belov nor his comrades see anything bad in their conduct. On the contrary, they think of drunkenness as manliness [doblesti]:'' 6 In November 1958, the journal Agitator published an article responding to reader letters worrying that the party's anti-drinking stance would get in the way of socializing with friends or making connections at work.' 7 These attitudes appear to have been extremely common. In fact, it seems likely that many Communists needed to go out drinking with their colleagues if they hoped to advance within the party: the pages that follow include many cases of administrators disciplined for getting drunk with their subordinates, and archival documents sometimes allude to Communists who experienced career setbacks when they refrained from participating in collective drinking sprees.'8 Even the party apparatus was not immune from the

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alcohol problem. When the Central Committee sent an investigator to Penza Province in 1956 to determine how a local raikom had lost its copies of Khrushchev's Secret Speech, he found that the local leadership's frequent drunkenness was seriously hurting its work, noting that the raikom cafeteria served vodka at lunch each day.'9 In a case from the 196os, finally, the future Nobel laureate Zhores Alferov even argued against the expulsion of an acquaintance from the Komsomol by asking everyone at the meeting if they, too, were guilty of drinking on holidays. When everyone raised their hand, Alferov announced dryly, "This means that we should expel everyone:' 20 The problem of drunkenness, in short, represents a prominent trend in party efforts to enforce a clear and workable code of conduct: the growing division between what Communists said in public and did in private. Everyone publicly agreed that drunkenness was "a vestige of capitalism'' and a shameful behavior, but the leisure activity of many Soviet citizens revolved around binge drinking nonetheless. By the postwar years, in fact, it appears that drunkenness was becoming a more serious problem in Soviet life. Official statistics on this question are problematic, both because the regime was loath to highlight the extent of the problem and because its statistics covered only official production (ignoring the huge share of illegal homebrew production, or samogon). Nevertheless, between 1940 and 1973-a period when the Soviet population grew 28 percent-the sale of alcoholic drinks rose by more than 500 percent, according to official statistics. 22 The production of ethyl alcohol more than tripled between 1950 and 1965; beer production more than doubled. 23 These changes far outstripped the growth of the population and were likely driven by the urbanization of the Soviet Union, the expansion of the economy, the growth of workers' leisure time, and the lack of good consumer options and leisure activities for workers. 24 Moreover, official statistics most likely understate the extent of the alcohol problem, since they ignore the growth in hard liquor that was produced illegally at home. Unsurprisingly, then, the Communist Party continued to expel a substantial number of its members for drunkenness in the postwar years. As noted in chapter 5 (and shown in table 18), the party expelled between seven thousand and ten thousand members for drunkenness and family misconduct each year, most likely censuring three or four times as many Communists for the same two offenses; the evidence suggests that drunkenness cases outnumbered family cases by a margin of approximately three to one. 25 Table 19, moreover, shows the number of Communists disciplined for drunkenness at two major Soviet factories, where censure cases outnumbered expulsions by a margin of three or four to one. 26 Taken as a whole, these statistics suggest that the party expelled five thousand to seven thousand Communists for drunkenness each year and reprimanded another twenty to thirty thousand Communists for the same offense. The evidence also suggests two final conclusions: that the party disciplined only a fraction of its hard-drinking Communists each year/ 7 and that even when the 21

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expulsion rate remained steady, the amount of time party organs spent discussing alcohol abuse in party meetings rose steadily through the postwar years, making the issue of drunkenness unavoidable for Communists. As shown in table 18 and chapter 5, the number of expulsions for "unworthy conduct in everyday life" remained largely steady in the postwar era, at a time when expulsion was generally becoming more difficult, and may even have grown in frequency. This fact highlights both the desire of the regime to intervene in party members' lives to fight alcoholism and the obstacles facing that ambition: given the heavy focus given to drunkenness under Khrushchev in particular, the expulsion rate could-and perhaps should-have risen much higher. The fact that the expulsion rate in drunkenness cases remained fairly stable even as the regime launched a high-profile anti-drinking campaign suggests that there was substantial resistance to anti-alcohol measures, and that the party discipline process was ill-suited for the struggle with drinking, or both.

Drunkenness, Labor Discipline, and Work under Stalin In March 1948, the party committee ofKalinin's train-car factory heard a case that symbolized the challenge facing the party in drunkenness cases of the late Stalin era. The accused Communist, Comrade E, was a factory administrator accused of coming to work drunk and hurting his workshop's productivity. Many committee members were inclined to be easy on him: "As a worker and a specialist, Comrade E is effective;' the first speaker noted, "and he's not bad as a social activist [kak obshchestvennik]. His only shortcoming is wine: he acts tactlessly when he's drunk:' The PPO secretary agreed. He criticized Comrade E's "habitual, repeated drinking bouts;' concluding that Comrade E's behavior merited expulsion, but that "in my opinion, if he is left in the party, he will reform himself' In a typical case, testimonials like these would have been enough to save Comrade E's skin, but in this instance, the tenor of the discussion quickly changed. The hearing's third speaker pointed out that as a result of the drunk administrator's antics, "[t]he whole workshop is stirred up:' "In actual fact;' he concluded, "we've been dealing with Comrade E since 1945, and every time he promises to reform and asks us to forgive him:' Later speakers pointed out that Comrade E pestered the women in the workshop, swore drunkenly in public places, and had lost his authority among the workers. In the face of this barrage, the committee had no choice but to expel Comrade E!8 What makes this story noteworthy was the commentary by the third speaker, who directly challenged Comrade E's excuses and convinced his comrades to expel him. What makes it remarkable is what happened next. Sixteen months later, in July 1949, the same committee heard the same charges about the same man's excessive drinking yet again: the gorkom had restored him to the party, but he had broken yet another promise to quit drinking. Now the factory

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TABLE 19-Party Discipline Cases Involving Drunkenness in Two Large Soviet Factories, 1945-1961 YEAR

CAsEs IN KALININ's

CASES IN MOLOTOv's

TRAIN-CAR

DZERZHINSKII FACTORY

CONSTRUCTION FACTORY

1945

4 (2 censures, 2 expulsions)

10 (6 censures, 3 expulsions, 1 warning)

1946

2 (1 warning, 1 expulsion)

8 (7 censures, 1 expulsion)

1947

6 (2 expulsions, 2 censures)

1 (1 censure)

1948

4 (3 expulsions, 1 warning)

6 (3 expulsions, 3 censures)

1949

2 ( 1 expulsion, 1 warning)

12 (7 censures, 5 expulsions)

1950

3 (3 censures)

5 (3 censures, 2 expulsions)

1951

2 ( 1 expulsions, 1 warning)

7 (5 censures, 2 expulsions)

1952

2 (1 expulsion, 1 warning)

10 (8 censures, 2 expulsions)

1953

4 (3 censures, 1 expulsion)

19 (14 censures, 5 expulsions)

7 (5 censures, 2 expulsions)

22 ( 17 censures, 5 expulsions)

1954 1955

12 (8 censures, 2 warnings, 2 expulsions)

21 (16 censures, 4 expulsions, 1 demotion)

1956

11 (7 censures, 4 expulsions)

12 (7 censures, 3 expulsions, 2 demotions)

1957

9 (7 censures, 1 expulsion, 1 demotion)

1958

8 ( 1 expulsion, 7 censures)

14 (13 censures, 1 expulsion)

1959

8 (6 censures, 2 expulsions)

26 (20 censures, 3 expulsions, 3 demotions)

1960

4 (4 censures)

20 (11 censures, 7 expulsions, 2 demotions)

1961 TOTALS

6 (5 censures, 1 expulsion)

11 (9 censure, 2 expulsion)

35 (26 censures, 8 expulsions, 1 warning)

99 (64 censures, 27 expulsions, 7 warnings, 1 demotion, 2 warnings)

232 ( 171 censures, 53 expulsions, 6 demotions, 2 warnings)

These statistics were compiled from factory party protocols and include cases officially described as "labor discipline" or "party card" cases. An alternate set of statistics states that 5 Communists at the Dzerzhinskii Factory were expelled for drunkenness in 1950 and 10 were reprimanded, which may mean that the party assembly of the factory also expelled some Communists. (GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 3, d. 6, I. 61.)

committee was driven to take stronger action. It expelled Comrade E from the party for "habitual drinking, hooliganism in public places, and appearing in work in an intoxicated condition;' recommended that the factory director fire Comrade E "without delay" (nemedlenno), and gave the leadership of his PPO a mild censure (an ukazanie) "for failing to take the needed measures" toward Comrade E. 29 This time the expulsion apparently stuck, and the case of Comrade E finally ended.

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As extreme as its details could be, this story was generally typical of postwar drunkenness cases. Although party rhetoric of the postwar Stalin years denounced drunkenness among Communists, both the leadership and the rank-and-file were remarkably forgiving of their comrades' alcohol abuse. The party's tolerance for Comrade E was probably based in part on his connections within the workplace, but the problem ran far deeper: even the gorkom had been unwilling to expel him, after all. More broadly, unless a Communist's drunkenness was connected to repeated labor discipline violations or resulted in a criminal sentence for hooliganism, party committees were often willing to bend over backwards to avoid expelling him. In fact, three factors allowed Communists to escape expulsion for drunkenness: the party's overwhelming focus on economic production, the widespread belief that heavy drinking was a choice that could be overcome through force of will, and the misconduct hearing's status as a site of moral reform, which enabled party members to let their comrades off the hook when they promised to mend their ways. The party leadership, it seems, was primarily interested in clamping down on drunkenness cases because of its desire for firm economic control, but this objective was often thwarted by the disciplinary system's unsuccessful efforts at vospitanie. Nearly every drunkenness hearing of the late Stalin era began in the same way: with a brief report discussing the Communist's alleged misconduct by the PPO secretary. More specifically, most cases began by describing an occasion when a Communist had either missed work or come to the job in an inebriated state; a smaller number began with a report on the Communist's detention for public disorderliness or the alcohol-induced loss of his party card. A typical hearing from 1948 opened with the comment that "on October 29 of this year, Comrade L did not work at his workshop, and at the same time the workers of the factory saw him in an inebriated state in the company of an unknown drunk man:' 3o A protocol from another case reported, "On April13 Comrade N should have worked from 4 o'clock, but he came to work drunk and was not accepted for work by the workshop's boss. On April14, Comrade N came to work in an inebriated condition again, and again was not accepted at work. Besides this, Comrade N is often rude to the workers and masters:' 3• Drunkenness cases almost never began with a denunciation and very rarely concerned a Communist's heavy drinking at home. This meant that drunkenness hearings involved a Communist's work habits and labor discipline almost as closely as they involved the simple use of alcohol. These facts had a major impact on the way drunkenness cases worked in practice. Since most alcohol-related cases resulted from a public event with witnesses (rather than from a denunciation), an accused Communist could not plausibly plead innocence and claim to have been sober. In many cases, moreover, a drunken Communist was accused of wrongdoing by a workplace supervisor, making misconduct hearings a matter of top-down economic control. As a result, drunkenness cases of the Stalin years often avoided the vicious

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give-and-take that characterized the discussion of Communists' mistreatment of their families. Although Communists sometimes reacted angrily when criticized for drunkenness, misconduct hearings rarely became more confrontational than the case of a workshop boss from the train-car factory, whose accuser announced, '~s the secretary, I repeatedly warned him and criticized [ukazyval] the shortcomings and the improprieties in his behavior, to which Comrade X answered me that he could drink 100 grams when he wanted:' 3' Communists typically defended themselves from drunkenness allegations in several ways. Most accused party members claimed that they had made a onetime mistake and minimized allegations that their drunkenness was a regular problem. The man cited above for missing work in October 1948 testified that his companion was his father-in-law, whom he had not seen in several years. 33 "I drink, but not habitually;' another Communist claimed. 34 When a security guard at the Dzerzhinskii Factory was accused of showing up at work drunk, he pleaded poor health: "I came to work with a strong hangover, I couldn't work, and I lay down to sleep for two hours;' he said. "I developed such a difficult conclition because I'm ill with dystrophy:' Given his work record, his World War II service, his lack of prior offenses, and his active participation in the factory's public life, the factory committee voted to rescind his censure and put him on notice (postavit' na vid) for his misconduct-35 Nevertheless, given the centrality of the workplace in drunkenness cases, the best way for an accused Communist to avoid expulsion was to portray himself as a diligent and dedicated worker. "I was in a very bad condition;' admitted one party member accused of showing up to work inebriated in April1945, "but I had only one thought: how could I get to the workshop?" 36 More often, however, it was the members of the party committee who would make the case for an accused Communist's economic usefulness. When the editor of the train-car factory's internal newspaper was accused of drunkenness in 1949, one committee member announced that he had "greatly corrected the work of the newspaper. The newspaper began to be published regularly, which was never true until then, and it became considerably more interesting and operative:'37 In a December 1948 case from the Dzerzhinskii Factory, the factory committee voted to rescind the expulsion of a Communist sentenced to six months of punitive labor for coming to work drunk because he "is an old experienced worker and a well-qualified Stakhanovite:'38 Committee resolutions like this were extremely common in the postwar era. Some party secretaries even highlighted the admirable work record of the accused in their opening remarks. 39 Accused Communists also threw themselves upon the mercy of the committee and promised to reform-a strategy that was often successful. After a PPO at the Dzerzhinskii Factory voted to expel a Communist who got drunk in a restaurant and lost his party card on the way home, the party committee of the full factory voted "to consider the decision of the party assembly correct;' but "considering that Comrade W deeply felt and sincerely recognized

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(chistoserdechno priznal) his guilt and asked to be left in the party;' it limited his punishment to a reprimand and a warning. 40 These "sincere'' (iskrennye) confessions invariably included a promise to "reform'' (ispravit'sia), and were often accompanied by a stern warning not to drink excessively again; the train-car factory's committee voted in 1946 to lessen the censure of one Communist to a minor admonition (a postanovka na vid), "considering his sincere recognition of his mistakes and his promise not to further violate party and productive discipline;' and coupled that resolution with a warning that "if he repeats these cases of appearing drunk at work, he will face the strictest measures of party punishment:' 4' Cases like this were the rule, not the exception. Of the six Communists accused of drunkenness at the Dzerzhinskii Factory in 1948, three had been expelled by their PPO but were restored because they "sincerely recognized" their guilt; the other three were ultimately expelled (one because he had also embezzled 5,875 rubles and two because they said they no longer wanted to be in the party)Y Even a Communist who had been given a criminal sentence of punitive labor, with 25 percent of his wages garnished, could be allowed to remain in the party when he announced that he had "sincerely repented" (iskrenno raskaialsia). 43 The central issue in drunkenness cases was that Communists were not especially eager to excoriate their comrades for drunkenness-especially given how common heavy drinking was within the party itself. Luckily for many accused Communists, it was more acceptable for party leaders to forgive a hard -drinking comrade who promised to reform than it would have been to forgive a serial embezzler or a man who had gotten married in church. Several factors enabled the party's lenience in drunkenness cases. First, Soviet citizens seem to have assumed that excessive drinking was the result of personal weakness and a lack of resolve. 44 The transcripts of Stalin-era party discipline cases almost never refer to "alcoholism" by name and frequently act as if it would be easy for a repentant Communist to swear off drinking through force of will, and Communists almost never asked whether a drunken comrade needed help fighting his drinking habits or faced any sort of medical issue. 45 Party resolutions dealing with Communists who had previously been censured often noted that the accused "did not draw the necessary conclusions" (ne sdelal dolzhnykh vyvodov) from earlier punishments; this phrase is especially common in drunkenness cases. Before 1953, there was a growing realization among doctors that alcoholism was a medical issue (and an addiction), but many party leaders treated the ability to quit abusing alcohol as a simple matter of willpower. 46 In short, a Communist could promise to stop drinking far more convincingly than he could promise to quit embezzling party dues or beating his wife. A Communist's job or political position also had an impact on party discipline cases involving drunkenness. Party members of all levels could be charged with heavy drinking. Many party reports on drunkenness focused on relatively high-ranking state and party officials, treating drunkenness as a sign of corruption; the stereotypical villain in these cases was a powerful figure whose alcohol

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abuse prevented him from doing his job or was part of a culture of malfeasance. A 1952 KPK report described several allegedly typical cases, including those of the Kazakh justice minister and the head of the Altai territorial court. The justice minister had failed to investigate the financial misconduct of his drinking buddies, while the judge accepted illegal gifts of alcohol from a factory director and allowed subordinates to organize wild collective drinking spreesY A more typical case appeared in Molotov Province in 1947, when a raikom secretary was censured and fired for drunkenness, cohabiting with a subordinate, and embezzling funds to support his drinking. In particular, he was accused of a lack of "modesty" (skromnost) and of pursuing a "luxurious lifestyle" -charges that were reminiscent of the Great Purges. 48 As these cases make clear, drunkenness was often viewed as part of a culture of entitled, corrupt leadership cliques; drinking with subordinates, in particular, was a far more serious offense than drinking alone. Although party discourse focused on drunkenness within officialdom, the party's struggle with alcoholism more often targeted lower-ranking Communists. Many of the Communists expelled from the party for drunkenness were low- to mid-level economic administrators, like kolkhoz chairmen or the bosses of factory workshops. These were Communists whose rank was high enough that their drunkenness could have real consequences, but too low to protect them from scrutiny. Between 1945 and 1949, for example, the party committee of Kalinin's train-car factory looked into the drinking habits of two workshop bosses, three PPO secretaries, a factory security chief, and a head of the horse park. 49 A majority of drunkenness cases involved rank-and-file workers, of course, but the share of factory workers and kolkhozniki in drunkenness cases appears to have been lower than their overall numbers within the party would indicate. The most likely targets of drunkenness allegations came from low- to mid-level management. Party reports criticized the lackadaisical approach to drunkenness taken by many local organizations. A 1950 report from the Dzerzhinskii Factory described both a rise in alcohol cases and the unacceptable response of the local leadership: the factory had a serious problem with workers who stayed home or came to work late because of inebriation, the report added, but "instead of punishing them, very many leaders of workshops cover up for violators:' Not a single Communist had been disciplined for alcohol abuse in one particular workshop where drunkenness ran rampant. 50 Yet another party report concluded that the party had a "defective system" (porochnaia sistema) when it came to hard -drinking Communists. "Instead of a warning and punishment;' it noted, the system "moves people who have compromised themselves in responsible work from one post to another, and the matter continues until expulsion:'5' The report cited an official from the Amurskii obkom who was removed from office for drinking, given a job as a gorkom secretary, fired for drinking again, and named a raiispolkom chairman in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Central Committee

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ultimately fired him and expelled him from the party for drunkenness, but only after years of cover-ups and delays. 5 In principle, the party's vision of drunkenness cases could have been revolutionary and transformative: for example, party leaders could have challenged the "backwardness" of peasant and proletarian binge drinking, fought for the improvement of party members' living conditions and leisure activities, and promoted a modern vision of drinking behavior that treated alcoholism as a disease and not a failure of willY To be sure, that path would have been difficult. Alcoholism was still often viewed as a matter of willpower in postwar America, after all, although the drinking problem there was less severe;54 moreover, because heavy drinking was linked especially closely to male sociability in Russia, it was guaranteed a prominent place in a party that was becoming more closely connected to the country's often-cliquish administrative elite. In fact, the party's late Stalinist approach to drunkenness barely acknowledged the need to transform society and often felt like a vestige of its class-based prewar vision of the ideal party member, who was expected to be a good proletarian or peasant, dedicated to building socialism through hard work. 55 By the 1940s, the revolutionary fervor of the prewar party had faded, and a party whose disciplinary system was based on principles of vospitanie ended up enabling its members to overlook their comrades' drunkenness when they promised to mend their ways. 2

Drunkenness as a Social Problem: The Khrushchev-Era "School of Communism"

When the party published a new handbook for PPO secretaries in 1960, it included a summary of the leadership's view of drunkenness that reflected developments since Stalin's death. "Drunkenness is one of the serious vices with which a Communist cannot be reconciled;' the handbook began, before adding that drunkenness "leads to a drop in productive labor, to absences and breakdowns at work, and to accidents:' The handbook went on to mention the damaging effects of alcohol abuse "on the foundations of the family" and to declare that drunkenness "cripples people physically and morally;' before concluding with a stark warning: Drunkenness is an amoral phenomenon with which we must wage an irreconcilable struggle, and the Communist should be first in this struggle. He himself cannot participate in drinking bouts and is obligated to restrain others from them. A Communist who abuses spirits is a bad Communist.... To those who continue their unworthy behavior, we will take stricter measures, all the way up to expulsion from the party. A hard-drinking Communist disgraces the title of a member of the CPSU and brings harm to communist construction. 56

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This description captures both the continuities and the changes in the regime's approach to drunkenness. Although the party maintained its traditional focus on the harmful effects of alcohol abuse on economic production, it directly acknowledged that drunkenness could threaten public health and the stability of the family as well; the party also toughened its rhetoric, demanding that Communists lead the struggle with drunkenness while restraining their peers from drunken revelry. In short, a good Communist was to be a "fighter for a socialist everyday life" in his or her approach to alcohol, not just in family lifeY Unsurprisingly, however, the party leadership had trouble translating its new attitude toward drunkenness into reality. The regime's tough new stance became evident in the summer of 1954, when the novelist Fedor Gladkov kicked off a multi-year series of articles on "the most evil vice of alcoholism'' by writers, doctors, and politicians;58 the regime also passed a series of new anti -drinking laws, including a December 1958 decree of the Central Committee and Council of Ministers calling for an acceleration of "the struggle with drunkenness" and a toughening of the law on home-brewing. 59 Perhaps most importantly, the regime even launched a crackdown on the crime of "hooliganism;' an offense that involved the disrespect of public order and almost always involved alcohol abuse. (As Brian LaPierre has shown, this crackdown entailed the creation of a new legal offense of "petty hooliganism;' as well as the growth of "domestic hooliganism'' in the home and the mobilization of"the public" against hooliganism in the form of comrades' courts and the druzhina.) 60 The party's new approach to drunkenness was plagued by a serious contradiction, however. On the one hand, it improved on the regime's old attitude by acknowledging that alcoholism was a serious medical issue and by seeking to confront alcohol abuse in its wider social context; on the other hand, it sought to vanquish alcoholism by stigmatizing offenders, portraying them as deviant and amoral, and forcing them to reform. This approach was doomed to failure: the party's belief in the power of shame went far beyond what most Communists would tolerate while ignoring many of the lessons of modern medicine. In short, party leaders failed in both of their goals-imparting a more modern understanding of alcohol abuse to the party faithful and stigmatizing heavy drinkers among their peers and comrades. A July 1955 case from Molotov's police department highlighted nearly every element of the party's new approach to drunkenness. The accused Communist, a policeman, often missed work and drank so heavily that his wife fled the house, prompting a comrade to declare, We have a poster, ''A drunk husband is a sorrow to the family;' and also, ''A drunk coworker is a sorrow to the party organization:' I think that when Comrade G came back to work again, he should already have recognized all his mistakes. But it turns out, on the other hand, that this person has already lost his power of will, that he's simply ill with alcoholism. 6 '

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Until the Khrushchev years, the transcripts of misconduct cases almost never featured the word "alcoholism"; by contrast, these remarks recognized both the impact of drunkenness on the family and the fact that alcoholism was a health problem. Nevertheless, although Comrade G's critics acknowledged that he was "ill with alcoholism'' and had failed to respond to several conversations on his drinking with party leaders, they seem to have assumed that he could regain his "power of will" and quit drinking if he simply chose to do so. In fact, although Comrade G referred to the hearing as a "school of Communism'' and vowed to reform, he broke his promise and was expelled from the party two years later because of his repeated detentions by the police for public drunkenness and the collapse of his family. 62 The first of the trends reshaping the party's approach to drunkenness, then, was the medicalization of the discourse surrounding drunkenness. To this day, scholars disagree on the extent to which alcoholism was seen as a medical issue even within the Soviet medical profession, but one conclusion is clear: the belief that alcohol abuse was an illness that could be treated began making at least some inroads within Soviet culture in the 1950s. 63 As the psychiatrist B. M. Segal has noted, the academic study of alcoholism had been severely restricted under Stalin and drunkenness was widely seen as a "vestige of capitalism'' rather than a universal social problem; in the aftermath of the Pavlov sessions, alcoholism was officially viewed as a "conditioned reflex" and other approaches to its treatment were limited. 64 Under Khrushchev, by contrast, the state began to emphasize the importance of medical treatment for alcoholics and to recruit psychiatrists as experts in the struggle with drunkenness. 65 Khrushchev-era party sources discuss the rise of propaganda lectures for workers on "alcohol and nervous illnesses" and the "struggle" for an alcohol-free, "healthy" everyday life. 66 Many newspapers and journals published articles by doctors on the evils of alcoholism, often with illustrations of the effect of alcohol on the heart and the brain. 67 The message was clear: drunkenness needed to be vanquished because of its health impact (not just its direct economic effects) and the only way to do so was through increased medical treatment. By the mid-1950s, then, references to "alcoholism'' and "treatment" (lechenie) began to appear frequently in party discipline cases. Instead of simply assuming that a Communist could "take himself in his own hands" and stop drinking, party leaders began to ask drinkers if they had received medical help and to suggest that they go to a hospital or a narcological clinic. In some cases, Communists managed to argue down their punishment by pointing out that they had spent time in the hospital, while in others, party organs showed lenience toward Communists who had sought medical help. In 1961, for instance, the obkom in Kalinin lessened the censure of a drunken Communist who repeatedly missed work because he was "now undergoing a course of treatment against alcohol and deeply recognize [d] his guilt himself' 68 Other cases resembled that of Comrade F, a woman (discussed in more detail below) whose drinking hurt her son.

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The first speaker at the hearing warned her, Comrade F "needs to sincerely confess, and if she's ill, get treatment [lechitsia ]-otherwise we'll expel her from the party, remove her from work, and deny her [the rights of] maternity:' 69 Still other party organs combined the language of modern medicine with rhetoric emphasizing willpower, such as a kolkhoz party committee that expelled a Communist who "did not draw conclusions for himself and did not master his power of will" after the raikom "repeatedly took measures of party influence" toward him and gave him a month of treatment in a hospital_lo If nothing else, these cases suggest that many Khrushchev-era Communists had adopted the language of medicine when they discussed alcohol abuse-even in instances where they went on to expel a Communist for a lack of willpower. Many Communists tried to use their treatment as a way to escape expulsion. A Communist from Rostov Province, who had been censured twice, demoted to candidate status, and finally expelled for drunkenness, tried unsuccessfully to win reinstatement in 1954 by arguing that he had been treated and "now no longer drinks:' 7' A Communist accused of missing work at the Dzerzhinskii Factory even confided to the committee, My deed was very bad. I could no longer restrain myself. I appealed to Fedorov at the raikom and he sent me to a mental hospital. There they prescribed treatment for me. I am now treated at the ambulatory by Doctor Litvak. This treatment helps me, and I am already indifferent toward drinking.7 2

Another Communist from Molotov Province was even accused of pretending to be an alcoholic to obtain a lighter punishment when he was reprimanded for disturbing the public order73-a possible sign that some Communists did not take the idea of "alcoholism" completely seriously. Still other cases combined the languages of medicine and morality, simultaneously asking an accused Communist to get medical treatment and to "candidly tell the party assembly about his sins:' 74 The medicalization of party discussions of alcohol abuse was most likely driven by three main factors. First, as noted above, the alcohol problem in the Soviet Union appears to have been on the uptick during the 1950s and 1960s, forcing the regime to react more aggressively than it had in the past. Second, the death of Stalin allowed for a more public discussion of social problems and for changes in approach within the medical discipline and the government/5 Third, the medical profession's vision of alcohol abuse was changing throughout the world-not just in the Soviet Union. In 1956, for example, the American Medical Association declared alcoholism a disease for the first time in its history/ 6 A culture of heavy drinking was unusually entrenched within Soviet society, but party discussions of drunkenness nevertheless highlight changes that were apparent in Europe and America as well. The challenge for the party was that many Communists continued to believe that drunkenness was a matter of willpower, whatever propaganda they were exposed to.

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Beginning in the mid-1950s, the medicalization of party discussions of drunkenness was accompanied by a second change: a growing desire to view the causes and consequences of drinking within a wider context. Party propaganda began to look at the impact of drunkenness through illustrative examples that had nothing to do with economic production, for example. (One pamphlet described the case of a driver who drank at home, insulted his wife, and quarreled with the neighbors-even though "at work no one ever saw him drunk:')7 7 At the same time, some party organizations examined the social environment surrounding drunkenness to determine what forces compelled party members to drink: when the Dzerzhinskii Factory's party committee looked at the wrongdoing of one Communist, a coworker reported, "He does not read books and newspapers. His only entertainment is his drinking, his motorcycle riding, and his foullanguage:' 78 When another worker at the factory was asked about what accounted for her drunkenness, she replied, "I don't know. I don't read newspapers and I even turn off the radio:' 79 To be fair, party committees were always supposed to look into issues like these; a 1949 report criticized the party committee in one workshop of the Dzerzhinskii Factory, noting, "they are not interested in the everyday life of Communists, do not visit them at home, and [are not interested] in how they spend their time and how they conduct themselves in their family:•so But by the mid-1950s, party misconduct hearings involving alcohol abuse actually began to broach these questions in detail for the first time since at least 1945 (and likely before). 8' In particular, party rhetoric on drunkenness began to place greater importance on the stability of the family. When the Dzerzhinskii Factory's party committee questioned a Communist who came to a party meeting drunk and was turned away from work, it asked him, first, if he had a family and, second, how his drinking affected the lives of his four children.82 Another Communist (accused of habitual drunkenness and labor discipline violations) felt compelled to announce, "I have not been drinking since the first of May and everything is in order in my family:' 83 Other typical opening questions included: "How are things in your family?"; "How is your family?"; "How is your behavior reflected in your family?"; and "How is your life with your wife and mother?"84 Strikingly, each of these Communists got into trouble by coming to work drunk, but the party hearings on their misconduct nevertheless began by looking at family issues. Other cases made the impact of drinking on home life even more evident. In a rare case involving a drunken female Communist, one party member noted, "Comrade F needs to understand that she has morally fallen. Instead of restraining her husband from drinking, she drank with him and raised their children badly:' 85 In yet another case from the factory, a hard-drinking man was asked, "How does your wife react to your drinking?" "I've had a lot of serious conversations with my wife;' he replied. 86 In a final case, the accused Communist was even told that "your wife worries about your behavior more than you do:' 87

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Rhetoric like this had been rare in party misconduct hearings of the late Stalin years, but often played a major role in Khrushchev-era drunkenness cases; after all, as shown in chapter 5, party sources of that period often portrayed the ideal Communist as a family man or woman. When Comrade R, from the Dzerzhinskii Factory, was accused of attempting a robbery while drunk, the committee posed several questions about his home life, including: "What kind of family do you have?"; "What compels you to drink and how do you live with your wife?"; "Where is your oldest son?"; and (after learning that the son was in jail) "What was he convicted of?"88 (The answer: "Theft and hooliganism:') One of Comrade R's accusers addressed him like a child, using the familiar secondperson ty, and declared, "it's not an accident that you have a son raised this waY:' Still another committee member announced, "I know Comrade R's son well as the organizer of various drinking-bouts [popoiki] and robberies;' before announcing that Comrade R and his son liked to drink together and warning him that his behavior could also "infect" his younger son. 89 Party misconduct hearings highlighted a final change in the discussion of alcohol abuse: a shift in the location of drunken misconduct from the workplace to the street. To be sure, the party had always been tough on Communists convicted of hooliganism, but in the Khrushchev years, the regime launched a new crackdown on public disorder and rallied a wide variety of public organizations to fight drunken misconduct in public. 90 In April1954, a factory worker named Comrade 0 went to Molotov's Kama restaurant, drank until he lost consciousness, and was sent to a detox center; he was then photographed by correspondents for the newspaper Molodaia gvardiia, who published an article declaring him a "violator of public order:' As a colleague pointed out, "Our city stands in first place in crime, and you, as a Communist, were arrested at the very moment when the Komsomol began a struggle with such violators:' 91 This trend was also illustrated in cases where inebriated Communists were detained not by the police, but by a volunteer crime-fighting squad called the druzhina: in one case, a workshop boss was stopped by the druzhina "in a strongly inebriated condition'' at his factory's southern housing settlement, for which he was reprimanded "for violating the rules of public order:' 92 A Communist at the Dzerzhinskii Factory, meanwhile, was given a warning in 1961 for "ignoring an order" of a druzhina leader 93 -an outcome that would not have happened before 1953 (or perhaps even 1959). Other Communist factory workers were reprimanded (but not prosecuted) for "violating order in the city at night" (by starting a fight and then insulting the police), for drunkenly "pestering" train passengers, for quarreling with a train conductor, and for collapsing drunk on the street. 94 Cases like these showed a fascinating wrinkle in the party's approach to drunkenness. Soviet citizens accused of drunken disorder were often charged with the legal offense of"hooliganism:' As Brian LaPierre has shown, hooligans were average Soviet male workers in most respects, but the regime nevertheless

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portrayed them as rowdy, unrefined, and uncultured deviants on the periphery of Soviet society;95 this portrayal highlighted a discourse on alcohol abuse that competed with the regime's notion of problem drinkers as alcoholics with a serious medical problem. Strikingly, the concept of hooliganism was both omnipresent and invisible in party discussions of drunkenness. On the one hand, evidence of the obshchestvennost' campaign was plentiful in Soviet drunkenness cases: party sources emphasized the need to stigmatize drunken Communists who committed "antisocial acts" and plenty of cases began when a Communist was charged with hooliganism in court. On the other hand, the word "hooligan''-which could probably have been applied to a majority of accused Communists-was almost never used to describe drunken party members. Communists were expelled for "hooliganism" when they had been formally prosecuted for that offense in the justice system, but otherwise, Communists themselves were almost never addressed or described as "hooligans" at party hearings. They were instead accused of the more mundane offenses "unworthy conduct in everyday life" and "habitual drunkenness:' Although party organizations were ready to stigmatize and shame their members into better behavior, they were rarely willing to acknowledge that the party's ranks were stained with deviants and "hooligans:' That term was too powerful to use for all but the most recalcitrant of hard-drinking Communists. After all, as much as the regime's attitude toward drunkenness had changed since 1953, the party's approach to "unworthy behavior" often resembled its Stalin-era approach. For one thing, the party had not completely replaced its worries about economic production with concerns about the family, public health, and public order. Most drunkenness cases still arose when a Communist missed work and prominently featured traditional issues oflabor discipline. (In other words, although many drunken Communists were berated for the impact of their actions on the family, a party member was unlikely to be disciplined unless his or her actions also affected life at work; very few Communists were denounced for their drunken behavior in the home.) For another, although the regime's rhetoric had grown tougher and the struggle with drunkenness had risen in prominence, party misconduct cases were still based on the idea that drunkenness was a "vestige of capitalism" that could be defeated through sheer force of will. Consider the following interrogation of a Communist who showed up to work drunk and fell asleep on the job: QUESTION: How do you explain the fact that many Communists drink heavily [p'ianstvovali]? ANSWER: You just need to pay greater attention to Communists, and then there won't be such a situation. QUESTION: How do you raise your political level? ANSWER: I study in Averin's circle on political economy.

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QUESTION: Why do you miss classes? ANSWER: I miss them because I work the third shift. QUESTION: How often do you drink, and how are matters in your family? ANSWER: I drink often, but everything in my family is in order. QUESTION: Are there violations in your brigade? ANSWER: There are, and I'll lead a meeting on that theme. QUESTION: How do you deal with the production program? ANSWER: I fulfill the plan. QUESTION: How many children do you have? ANSWER: Two sons. One works and the other is a student in the third class. QUESTION: You don't think that this is a bad example for your son? ANSWER: Maybe that's so. 96 The discussion in this case was brief and superficial; the case ended with a reprimand for the accused Communist, who did not sound especially sincere in his desire to reform. Although the Communists at the hearing brought up the accused's family and briefly asked how drunkenness at the factory could be stopped, the transcript otherwise sounded like that of a discipline-focused Stalin-era hearing. Drunkenness cases of the 1950s and 196os, then, combined the Stalin era's interest in economic production and personal discipline with the Khrushchev era's focus on vospitanie and the close supervision on everyday life. A Communist at one Khrushchev-era hearing summed up the prevailing view when he noted, "it seems to me that we need to take all measures for the reeducation [perevospitanie] of a person, and if there is absolutely no hope for his improvement, only then raise the question of expulsion from the partY:'97 The goal of the process, in other words, was to inspire a "sincere" confession and a "candid" promise to reform-not to expel the guilty or cleanse the party's ranks of deviants. This approach was probably based in part on the regime's new emphasis on vospitanie and personal reform and in part on the lack of enthusiasm of many Communists. Still, the overwhelming message sent by party discussions of drunkenness was that most Communists were willing to give their comrades the benefit of the doubt. Party organizations at every level continued to have faith in Communists who promised to reform-even if a factory committee voted to expel someone, the raikom or obkom often disagreed. In essence, the only ways a Communist could be expelled for drunkenness were if he was a repeat offender accused one time too many or if he explicitly refused to quit drinking. Both these facts were true of Comrade U, whose case introduced this chapter. Many proceedings, then, ended with the accused Communist being asked if he could stop drinking. Most Communists assured the party that they could, saying, for example, "I have enough strength, I will no longer allow such things"98 or "I already announced that this has been a great lesson for me, and I have the power and the will to take myself in my hands and refrain from drinking

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[ vypivki]. I give my word that in the future I will not commit any offenses:' 99 When the gorkom in Krasnokamsk considered the case of a man who lost his party card after getting drunk with two unknown men, it concluded by asking him, "Can you make a promise, that this will not be repeated any more with you?"; the man ended his chances for reinstatement when he replied, "No, I cannot:'100 Many party committees were not just willing to forgive repentant Communists-they seemed driven to convince errant party members to reform themselves, as a November 1955 protocol from the Dzerzhinskii Factory shows. When the committee began quizzing Comrade M, a recently fired worker on the night shift, about why he had shown up drunk at work, he was at first far from cooperative:

QUESTION: What compels you to drink? ANSWER: No one, I thought I'd go to work and I was stopped at the entrance to work. QUESTION: Do you have a family? ANSWER: I have a wife and a child. QUESTION: Where and with whom do you drink? ANSWER: I go to the city and drink. QUESTION: Does that mean that you drink without any reason, only when you go to the city? ANSWER: It appears that way. QUESTION: Are you an alcoholic, are you ill? ANSWER: No, of course not, I just drink. QUESTION: Then why haven't you been treated? You're still young. ANSWER: Those are trifles. To be treated, not to be treated-I've heard of little benefit of this. QUESTION: Where do you work now? ANSWER: I moonlight [shabashnichnaiu].•o• Then the interrogation ended and the speech-making began. One speaker gave Comrade M an impassioned warning: You need to think hard about yourself. You are still young, your life is ahead of you. If you don't get treated and quit drinking, you will go with the moonlighters to thievery, maybe end up in a house of incarceration. You are headed downward. Think hard about the position in which you find yourself. You have left a good collective. Truly you have been forced to isolate yourself by your behavior, because you did not justify the calling of the vanguard role of a Communist. Comrade M, think carefully about yourself.'02 Another Communist urged him to get treatment, telling him that he was wrong to doubt its effectiveness; another reminded Comrade M that an expulsion

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resolution had failed by just one vote in his PPO, which had warned him "more than once" to reform; the final speaker warned him that he was "on the verge of expulsion;' told him he would "fall lower" without reforming himself, and repeated the advice, "you are young, your life is ahead of you, think thoroughly about your position:' When Comrade M confirmed that he wanted to stay in the party, the committee voted to give him a strict reprimand noted on his card. 103 Comrade M's case illustrates a final change in the atmosphere that surrounded drunkenness under Khrushchev. There was a "culture of permissiveness" that surrounded drunkenness under Stalin; by the 1950s, even when party organs were disinclined to expel Communists accused of boozing and carousing, their attitude seemed harsher and more unrelenting. Many of the Communists described in this chapter were repeatedly humiliated in front of their friends and coworkers. Alcoholism was being stigmatized in the press to an unprecedented degree, and word of wrongdoers' behavior surely spread quickly in the workplace. Moreover, many protocols hint that party supervision of Communists' private lives was growing behind the scenes, through party leaders' informal "conversations" about drunkenness and through frequent visits by party leaders to the homes of wrongdoers. The result was a narrowing of the sphere of privacy and a growing role for party functionaries in everyday life. The party's incursions into the homes of its members might have been more tolerable if they had been more effective, but many party leaders lamented the extent of the country's alcohol problem and the recalcitrance of hard -drinking Communists. Drunkenness, a supposed "vestige of the past;' showed no signs of dying out.

Drunkenness, Party Discipline, and Public Opinion

One of the most prominent characteristics of postwar drunkenness cases is the glaring mismatch between party rhetoric and reality. The 1950s and 1960s, after all, were a time when the regime was trumpeting the arrival of the "New Soviet Person'' and hailing the efforts of Communists and other citizens to vanquish "the vestiges of the past"; party publications frequently spoke of the high "moral profile of the Communist" and announced that the country's Communists were "active fighters" for the creation of a New Soviet Man.'04 1he regime's rhetoric denounced social problems like hooliganism, parasitism, child abandonment, divorce, and drunkenness, suggesting that they could be eliminated if party members led a struggle to transform the consciousness of the population as a whole. To do this, party sources agreed, Communists would need to stigmatize and shame offenders, to teach them the "norms of socialist life:' There were two main problems with this approach. First, regime sources often refused to acknowledge the existence of the country's most serious problems within the ranks of the party: Communists themselves were almost never

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denounced as "hooligans" or "parasites;' for example, even though the former term in particular could be applied to many drunken party members. 105 Second, although Communists talked tough about alcohol abuse throughout the postwar years, they often voted to let their hard-drinking comrades off the hook even in the midst of a stringent campaign against alcohol abuse and hooliganism. Although some Communists probably had an exaggerated belief that party disciplinary hearings would inspire their comrades to change their ways, this leniency most likely resulted from members' lack of enthusiasm for the stigmatization of drunkenness. After all, the Soviet Union had an ingrained culture of heavy drinking that could not easily be shaken by the regime's propaganda and by the tough rhetoric of the country's Communists. The party leadership, in short, was unsuccessful either in instilling its vision of proper drinking behavior into the party membership or in convincing party members to crack down on comrades who violated its norms. By the late 1950s, the party's struggle with drunkenness was as prominent as it had ever been. In the spring of 1958, for example, the Central Committee distributed a closed letter "on strengthening the struggle with drunkenness and home-brewing;' sparking discussions in party organizations across the USSR. Hundreds of thousands of Communists gathered at their PPOs to talk about the letter and brainstorm ideas for fighting the alcohol problem. By June 12, 592 of Murmansk's 735 primary party organizations had convened to discuss the letter, with 14,434 Communists in attendance and 3,051 party members participating in the debate;106 by June 5, the letter had been discussed by 33,719 Communists in more than half of the PPOs in Perm' Province;'07 over So percent of the Communists in the Udmurt ASSR gathered to discuss the letter. 108 These meetings discussed the need for propagandists to present lectures on topics like "the evils of alcohol;' "the moral profile of the Soviet man;' "drunkenness-a survival of the past;' and "alcohol and nervous illnesses:'109 Communists were to rally "public opinion'' (obschestvennoe mnenie) and present an "irreconcilable attitude" toward drunkenness. Party organizations reported favorably to the Central Committee on the increased willingness of Communists to denounce their peers for drunkenness after these meetings. (On one kolkhoz near Murmansk, four party members [including the farm chairman] were quickly disciplined, while in the Udmurt ASSR alone, the party expelled 39 members for drunkenness and censured a total of 218.)no Meetings about the closed letter also resulted in an explosion of impassioned anti-drinking speeches calling on the party to "put an end" to drunkenness. "In our country there should be no place for this lack of culture [beskultur'iu], for drunkenness;' noted a Saratov man. "We should view every appearance of drunkenness as a great evil:'m Nevertheless, as shown in table 18, the results of the party's campaign were modest: the number of Communists expelled for "unworthy conduct in everyday life" rose from 7,865 to 9,741 between 1957 and 1958, before dropping slightly in the years that followed.n Although many misconduct cases were supposed 2

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to be discussed in open party meetings (which non-Communists could attend), party publications of the Khrushchev years often published letters suggesting that party organizations were afraid of airing their dirty laundry in front of the non-party masses, especially in drunkenness cases. 113 Many party organs continued to express optimism about the alcohol problem, even as they expressed frustration about a lack of results. On February n, 1961, the obkom in Kalinin passed a resolution denouncing two of its raikoms for failing to fulfill a recent Central Committee resolution "on strengthening the struggle with drunkenness and home-brewing:'n 4 In the Proletarskii raion, the police had sent over two thousand drunk people to medical detoxification centers (medvytrezviteli) during 1960; in the same year, the police in the Spirovskii raion had arrested 362 people, while the hooliganism rate rose 17 percent, the robbery rate rose 85 percent, and the theft of state and social property increased by 27 percent. The resolution concluded on a depressing note, lamenting that "cases of drunkenness and the violation of public order are often tolerated by Communists and Komsomol members:'n5 The obkom went on to denounce the shortcomings of the Proletarskii and Spirovskii district committees. Part of the problem was that alcohol sales were too high in the Proletarskii raion: twenty-three of the fifty-five stores that sold vodka in Kalinin were based in the district. 116 But more importantly, the raikom was not doing enough to educate Communists about the evils of drinking or to involve the public in the struggle with drunkenness: Party raikoms and many primary party organizations are still pursuing the accompanying political work poorly in enterprises, factories, and establishments on the vospitanie of workers, especially youth, in a Communist attitude to labor, everyday life, and proper behavior in society; they are weakly waging propaganda for a healthy everyday life, are not raising the role of public organizations, people's druzhiny, and comrades' courts against numerous facts of drunkenness, home-brewing, amoral occurrences, and criminality, and are (as before) assigning this work to the police, the courts, and the procuracy. In many collective enterprises, kolkhozy, and establishments, conditions have not been created for the social condemnation of and intolerance toward drunks and home-brewers. 117 The resolution ended with a sweeping series of recommendations: that the raikom expand the role of party organs, the Komsomol, and local soviets in the struggle with alcohol; improve the work of institutions like the comrades' courts and the druzhina; encourage newspapers to publish articles on the behavior of Communists; and "rouse public opinion against drunks and home-brewers:'us To most party organs, then, the root of the problem was that Communists were insufficiently intolerant of drunkenness-a problem that predated the Khrushchev-era anti-alcohol campaign. In the case of the workshop boss

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detained by a druzhina in 1960, cited above, a fellow Communist expressed bewilderment about the situation: "The behavior of the Communists in the workshop is incomprehensible to me:' he said. "They were all witnesses when Comrade W appeared in the workshop in an inebriated condition, but he had no reprimands as a Communist:'n9 When a major scandal broke out at Kalinin's train-car factory in 1955, party leaders worried about their failure to rally "public opinion'' against drunkenness. The problems began when at least six Communists showed up drunk at the factory's electoral assembly and began to disrupt proceedings: one worker, Comrade V, "agitated the meeting with his hysterical cries" and then stormed the rostrum to give a speech. (After he was removed from the assembly hall, he spent a break in the proceedings swearing loudly, pestering party members, and trying to hit a fellow Communist.) 120 "Maybe I, as the director, punished them too little on the administrative line;' one member of the factory committee noted. "But lone administrative punishments would not improve matters. We need to create public opinion against each type of violation, since nothing can act on a person as strongly as the public:' The factory director concluded that the Communists involved should be given "the strictest party punishments" and that the jobs of lenient administrators should be threatened. 121 Other Communists were less sanguine. "The whole affair consists of the fact that we talk a lot, but take very few measures;' one PPO secretary announced. "We need to strictly punish those-if one might call them Communists-who were especially defiant at the party meeting, such as Comrade V from the mounting workshop, for example. It seems to me that there is no place in the party for such a person:'m Interestingly, the next speaker explained the problem by saying that the crowd had been loudest during a speech by one particular party leader, who "did not say anything definite" and refused to answer questions about the poor supply of kerosene and groceries. The speaker explained that in his own meetings, "the first question posed to me is always, 'Why is there nothing in the stores?' and what can I say? ... At such a big meeting we needed to give the Communists an answer that was exact and clear:' The debate ended with a resolution denouncing the factory's party organs for their poor educational work and for "a liberal attitude toward Communists who violate party and production discipline:' 123 The aftermath of this scandal demonstrates just how far the party had to go in mobilizing public opinion against drunkards and in shaping the attitude of Communists to alcohol abuse. Comrade V's PPO voted to give him only a simple reprimand; the PPO secretary was told to deal with the case immediately, but as the factory committee's protocol noted, "despite the repeated reminders of the partkom secretary;' he "prolonged this question and tried to minimize the seriousness of the given misdeed;' resulting in a two-week delay and a lenient punishment. 124 The committee then voted to expel Comrade V, but it limited the penalty of five other Communists involved in the disturbance to a reprimand,125 and the raikom overturned Comrade V's expulsion. 126 Even an embarrassing

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scandal could not shake the party's deep-seated disinclination to expel alcoholics from its ranks. One Communist's remarks from Kalinin-"we talk a lot, but take very few measures" -perfectly captured the party's approach. As shown in this chapter, the main goal of many Khrushchev-era party organs seems to have been to convince hard-drinking Communists to confess, not to get them medical treatment or to address the root causes of the alcohol problem. This comment appeared in the midst of the Khrushchev-era campaign to mobilize Communists against alcohol abuse, but it could have appeared at nearly any point in the postwar era; even at the height of the anti-drinking campaign, the regime was unable to stigmatize drinking, to inspire heavy drinkers to change their ways, to give alcoholism treatment the resources it deserved, or to rally public opinion against drunkenness. There were moments when the regime seemed to be on the right track-say, when it publicly recognized alcoholism as a medical problem. But the involvement of the party discipline system does not seem to have significantly helped the regime deal with the alcohol problem. If anything, it emphasized that other state organs (like the druzhina and the comrades' court) had become more fashionable agents of social change and that expulsion and censure were unlikely to be successful tools in building social stability. Whether Communists faced a culture of permissiveness or an invasive network of inquisitive party organs, the alcoholics among them could rarely give up the bottle.

Conclusion

T

H E C 0 M M U N I S T p A R T Y ' S S Y S T E M of internal discipline enjoyed a paradoxical status in postwar Soviet society. On the one hand, it was ever-present in the lives of Communists and even, to a lesser degree, in the lives of Soviet citizens more broadly. Misconduct hearings were a ubiquitous part of the party's organizational life, subjecting accused Communists to invasive and humiliating hearings and informing observers about the proper rules of behavior for Soviet citizens. When the Eighteenth Party Congress ended the practice of the mass purge and mandated that expulsion take place "on an individual basis;' it practically guaranteed that investigations of misconduct would be an everyday feature of the lives of Communists and party organizations for decades to come. On the other hand, the postwar party discipline system lost much of its centrality in Soviet politics in the postwar years. The party had purged 24.3 percent of its members in 1921, 11.8 percent in 1929, and 18.3 percent in 1933,' but it never expelled more than 3 percent of its members in any year covered by this volume. As party organizations paid less attention to the punishment of wrongdoers and to the purification of the party's ranks, they emphasized another objective: the spreading of the regime's values through the political elite via "education" and "persuasion:' The practices of party discipline were not ideal vehicles for this goal, however-especially once the regime began treating expulsion as a punishment of last resort in the Khrushchev years. Party misconduct hearings became the site of endless discussions of both petty personal matters and grand social issues; they were a constant irritant in the lives of Communists and shaped the careers of millions of party members. Nevertheless, the postwar party discipline system could not achieve the goals of the country's leadership. The reality of party discipline rarely lived up to the rhetoric of the regime. This does not mean, of course, that the party discipline system and the regime's vision of the ideal Communist failed to evolve in the postwar years. As the regime grappled with a postwar economic crisis and evolved from a revolutionary prewar government into a more bureaucratic postwar state, the Communist Party revised its informal behavioral code, shifting from a more limited and literal set of rules about a party member's role in the economy to a broader vision that encompassed all spheres of a Communist's life. Some of these changes resulted from the economic and demographic effects of World War II, which had devastated Soviet industrial output, threatened the country's birthrate, and led to new worries about the country's youth; at the same time, 2

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the mass influx of veterans and white-collar workers changed the party's class composition, linking the party membership to the country's administrative elite and weakening its ties to the old revolutionary proletariat. As a result of changes like these, the postwar Soviet regime became less concerned with the ideological orthodoxy, the class origins, and the political loyalty of party members, and more interested in how Communists treated their wives, raised their children, and handled their alcohol. When it came to the behavior of Communists, the regime replaced direct coercion from above with more subtle and invasive efforts to reshape the behavior of wrongdoers-efforts that were sometimes pursued inconsistently or erratically. At the same time, many postwar discussions of misconduct by Communists were shaped by a series of interlocking worries on the part of control officials and other party leaders: that the party membership was succumbing to passivity and losing its sense of activism and its intolerance for wrongdoing. The Communist Party had always worried about the attitudes and character of its members, of course, but the dramatic changes in the party's composition and size accentuated these fears, as the party membership quadrupled in size between 1939 and 1964 and became more closely linked to the white-collar workers who staffed the bureaucracy, rather than to the industrial workers who had long been the party's base. These changes were arguably inevitable, but they threatened the traditional identity and self-conception of the party elite while raising questions about the cohesiveness, discipline, enthusiasm, and activism of the party membership at large. Late Stalinist control officials frequently complained that the country's Communists were indifferent toward the problem of corruption and passive in their duties as party members: even honest Communists were often unwilling to confront their comrades when they accepted bribes, embezzled state funds, or spent their working days drinking heavily and ignoring their official responsibilities. A Communist's need to display "intolerance" and "implacability" in the struggle with wrongdoing returned to the political discourse with a vengeance during the Khrushchev years, when the party began to champion a new set of behavioral expectations for party members. Communists were urged not only to be role models themselves in their public and private lives, but to be "fighters for communism'' who would challenge their comrades and peers whenever a fellow citizen violated the "norms of socialist life:' This new set of expectations, which involved both upright personal behavior and an intolerance for misconduct in others, was part of the regime's larger effort to transform Soviet society by mobilizing activism from below and was enshrined in 1961's Moral Code of the Builders of Communism-the first code of conduct for Communists in the party's history. All did not go according to plan, however. The new status of the party discipline system was illustrated beautifully by a June 1955 article in Bloknot agitatora, a journal published by the Moscow city party committee to help Communists explain regime propaganda to other citizens. In that article,

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entitled "Do Not Walk Past Violations ofpublic Order:' the head of the propaganda department of the Moscow city police outlined the many approaches that Soviet citizens were taking in the fight with hooliganism and public disorder, ranging from Komsomol campaigns to stigmatize heavy drinkers to the rise of volunteer brigades that helped the police maintain order in the streets. In the middle of this discussion, the article casually pointed out that three local Communists had recently been accused of getting into a drunken fight at a stadium, noting that their behavior "was discussed at workshop party assemblies"; the fate of the men was never mentioned, but the article announced that "the party committee and the administration of the factory brought this disgraceful case of hooliganism to the attention of the factory's workers and sluzhashchie:'3 A reader of this article could be forgiven for assuming that the main purpose of the party's investigation had been informational-that the party was as concerned with teaching these Communists' coworkers a lesson as it was with giving the offenders a more formal punishment. In a more subtle way, the article also highlighted the declining prominence of party misconduct hearings, treating them as just one more tool of the regime alongside more fashionable forms of mass mobilization and vospitanie, like the Komsomol, the comrades' court, the press, and the druzhina. A 1962 pamphlet on the new party charter made a similar point. "With the successes of communist construction, a growing number of non-Communists live and work so that they cannot be distinguished from Communists:' its authors wrote. '~t the Twenty-First Congress, it was said that in the view of foreigners coming to the Soviet Union, all Soviet people were Communists. In conversations with workers, farmers, intellectuals, they could not tell which of them were Communists and which were non-members:' 4 The pamphlet intended this comment to be a sign of the regime's many victories, but it highlighted a contradiction in party rhetoric: the pamphlet's next chapter emphasized that the party's "leading role" in society was growing as the USSR entered the era of the construction of Communism-a major theme of the new party program. 5 The regime's Khrushchev-era rhetoric constantly emphasized the need to vanquish "vestiges of capitalism:' to combat "antisocial acts:' and to create the New Soviet Person-three tasks in which Communists would be intimately involved. But party disciplinary proceedings played a surprisingly peripheral role in many of these efforts. Party organizations spent more time calling on their members to become activists for good behavior in the population at large than they did enforcing a high standard of behavior among Communists themselves. The ambiguities and contradictions that defined the party discipline system did not arise by chance: they were the direct result of changes in the size and structure of the party that began in the 1930s and defined Soviet political life until1991. The Communist Party had more trouble crafting a cohesive identity and a strict behavioral code for its members in the postwar years than it had in the twenty years following 1917, when memories of the revolution were fresh, the party itself was relatively small, and party membership was closely linked to

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proletarian class identity. The declining role of expulsion within the party also made it harder for the party to enforce its behavioral norms, beginning with the Eighteenth Party Congress and continuing with Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign. The more the postwar party expanded and the more its leadership discouraged the purging and expulsion of renegade Communists, the more the country's leaders sought to promote a new sense of voluntary activism and a high standard of behavior for party members-a trend made apparent by the growing list of party members' obligations in each successive version of the charter and by the widespread publication of Khrushchev-era pamphlets on the demands of party membership. 6 But as time passed, the party itself became less prominent as a center of activism, losing ground to new or newly prominent groups like the comrades' court and the druzhina. This contributed to a feeling that party rhetoric did not match Soviet reality-that party officials were not overly concerned with political unorthodoxy among party members as long as Communists did not flaunt their heretical beliefs, and that party members were expected to speak out strongly against hooliganism and drunkenness even when they were heavy drinkers themselves. The story told in this book does not end in 1964. In the years that followed, many of the trends it describes became even more prominent within Soviet society. The Communist Party continued to grow in size after the overthrow of Nikita Khrushchev, for example-at a slower rate than it had in the 1950s, but at a pace that exceeded the growth of the Soviet population/ The party continued to show an interest in the intimate lives of its members as well. In 1966, for example, the party expelled 32,669 Communists because of misconduct in their private lives-roughly as many as it had expelled for all offenses in 1961;8 in 1967, it expelled 26,247 Communists for "unworthy conduct in [their] everyday life;' and only 9,572 for "criminal offenses, waste, theft, speculation, and bribery";9 in 1968, those totals came to 26,495 and 9,918, respectively, at a time when the size of the party had grown to 13,639,891.'0 Expulsion, in other words, became slightly more common after Leonid Brezhnev came to power, but never reached the extent of the postwar Stalin years and struggled to keep up with the growth in the party's ranks. Expulsion and censure became even less effective as tools in the party's struggle with corruption, but were used more frequently in cases involving drunkenness, hooliganism, and misconduct in the family. The intrusive investigations that began under Stalin and grew more common and more invasive under Khrushchev remained a fact of Soviet life until1991. The twenty years after World War II, in short, proved to be a crucial transitional period in Soviet history, from the revolutionary prewar era to the conservatism and corruption of the Brezhnev years and late socialism. The story told in this volume is an important part of that larger narrative, detailing the Communist Party's struggle to define and enforce a clear set of behavioral standards for the country's political elite during a time of dramatic change. As hard as it tried to evolve, however, the party failed to transform its internal disciplinary system into an effective tool for shaping the country's elite.

Notes

Notes to Introduction 1. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (hereafter RGANI) f. 6, o. 4, d. 2449, ll. 22-25. 2. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1586, 1. 138. 3. Tverskoi tsentr dokumentatsii noveishei istorii (hereafter TTsDNI) f. 147, o. 4, d. 549, 1. 179. 4. The phrase "the high title of a Communist" (vysokoe zvanie kommunista) was repeated frequently in party rhetoric. David Hoffmann notes a use of this term in a 1926 letter from an expelled Communist seeking reinstatement in his book Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917-1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 79. The phrase appeared frequently in speeches, was part of both the party program and charter of 1961, and became the title of works like A. Svinarenko, Vysokoe zvanie kommunista (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1966). 5. For statistics on expulsion, see RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 26, 1. 61. 6. Unfortunately, party statistics do not track the total number of reprimands, but as chapter 1 shows, reprimands (vygovory) seem to have outnumbered expulsions by a margin of at least two or three to one. 7. For a Pravda article emphasizing the importance of vospitanie in party discipline, see V. Kushteiko, "Chutko otnosit'sia k kazhdomu kommunistu:' Pravda, 9 April1951, 2. For a Commission of Party Control (KPK) report complaining about insufficient attention to the role of vospitanie in party investigations, see Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii (hereafter RGASPI) f. 17, o. 122, d. 98, l. 156. 8. For statistics on party membership, see RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 26; for population statistics, see E. M. Andreev, L. E. Darskii, and T. L. Kharkova, Naselenie sovetskogo soiuza, 1922-1991 (Moscow: Nauka, 1993). 9. For an account of the utopian ideals of the revolution, see Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); for an overview of Western studies of Russian subjectivity, see Anna Krylova, "The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies:' Kritika 1, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 119-46. Sheila Fitzpatrick has discussed the transformations undergone by Soviet society in the Stalin years in Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) and Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 10. RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 2449, ll. 22-25. 11. For an introduction to the literature on the Great Terror, see Robert Conquest, 7he Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); J. Arch Getty

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and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Roberta Manning and J. Arch Getty, eds., Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Wendy Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Wendy Goldman, Inventing the Enemy: Denunciation and Terror in Stalin's Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter- War Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 12. For recent works on the regime's attempts to change the values and worldview of Soviet citizens, see Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 13. Vladimir Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life ofthe Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) deal with this broad theme from two very different perspectives. 14. XVIII s'ezd Vsesoiuznoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii (b): 10-21 marta 1939 g., Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1939). 15. The party's association with the country's administrative elite began early in Soviet history and accelerated with the regime's policy of vydvizhenie, or worker promotion; see, for example, Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Stalin and the Making of a New Elite;' in The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 149-82; and John Armstrong, The Soviet Bureaucratic Elite: A Case Study of the Ukrainian Apparatus (New York: Praeger, 1959). 16. For a discussion of the populist politics of the Khrushchev years, see George W. Breslauer, Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders: Building Authority in Soviet Politics (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1982). 17. See, for example, V. Markov, Byt-ne chastnoe delo (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1964), 56. 18. For a useful anthology that examines this period, see Juliane Furst, ed., Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention (London: Routledge, 2006). See Vera Dunham, In Stalin's Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), for a classic study of the changing identity of Soviet citizens and members of the elite at this time. 19. For earlier works dealing with the invasiveness of the Khrushchev-era regime, see Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Deborah Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev's Russia (New York: Peter Lang, 2007); and Brian LaPierre,

Hooligans in Khrushchev's Russia: Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012). For three recent works dealing with Soviet youth in this era, see Benjamin Tromly, Making the Soviet Intelligentsia: Universities and Intellectual Life under Stalin and Khrushchev (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Margaret Peacock, Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); and Gleb Tsipursky, "Pleasure, Power, and the Pursuit of Communism: Soviet Youth and State-Sponsored Popular Culture during the Early Cold War, 1945-1968" (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2011).

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20. In a recent volume based on extensive oral histories, Donald Raleigh notes the rise of both Soviet patriotism and widespread cynicism in the USSR's analogue of the Baby Boomers. Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia's Cold War Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Sergei Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960-1985 (Washington, DC, and Baltimore, MD: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) also deals with ideology and identity in this era. 21. See T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the U.S.S.R., 1917-1967 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968); Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York: Random House, 1960); Darrell P. Hammer, The USSR: The Politics of Oligarchy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990); Ronald J. Hill and Peter Frank, The Soviet Communist Party (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983); Graeme Gill and Rod eric Pitty, Power in the Party: The Organization of Power and Central-Republican Relations in the CPSU (London: Macmillan, 1997); and Michael P. Gehlen, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union: A Functional Analysis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969). 22. For a classic study of the party's membership policies, see Rigby, Communist Party Membership. For a study of the impact of the war on Soviet political culture, see Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 23. For two early statements of this view, see Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1937); and Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (New York: Praeger, 1957). 24. Party pamphlets discussing this idea include V. Moskovskii, Partiia vsego naroda: Besedy o KPSS (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1962); and S. Sutotskii, 10 millionov idushchikh vperedi (KPSS-partiia vsego naroda) (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1963). 25. One recent work that does deal with the regime's internal workings in this era is Cynthia Hooper, "Terror from Within: Participation and Coercion in Soviet Power, 19241964" (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2003). 26. For recent studies emphasizing the economic, demographic, and social consequences of the war, see Mie Nakachi, "Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Post-War Soviet Union, 1944-1955" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2008); Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System after World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Donald Filtzer, The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards, 1943-1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Karl Qualls, From Ruins to Reconstruction: Urban Identity in Soviet Sevastopol after World War II (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). 27. See, for example, Michael Ellman and S. Maksudov, "Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: A Note;' Europe-Asia Studies 46, no. 4 (1994): 671-80; Iu. A. Poliakov and V. B. Zhiromskaia, Naselenie Rossii v XX veke (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001), vol. 2, chs. 2-8; Steven E. Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Washington, DC, and Baltimore, MD: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press and the Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 88-89; and Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). 28. See Elena Zubkova, Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo: Politika i povsednevnost', 1945-1953 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000); and Elena Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945-1957, trans. Hugh Ragsdale (Armonk, NY: M.

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E. Sharpe, 1998) for an important analysis of postwar Soviet history. On the effects of the war on Soviet political culture, see Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War. For studies ofWorld War II soldiers and veterans (and their role in postwar life), see Mark Edele, Soviet Veterans of World War II: A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society, 1941-1991 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Catherine Merridale, Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). Recent studies of postwar life that emphasize the many continuities between the Stalin and Khrushchev years include Stephen Bittner, The Many Lives ofKhrushchev's Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow's Arbat (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Juliane Fiirst, Stalin's Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Mark Smith, Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Problem from Stalin to Khrushchev (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). For a study of the Khrushchev-era Soviet media empire and its place in society, see Kristin Roth-Ey,

Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire that Lost the Cultural Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 29. Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945-1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) is the leading study of Soviet high politics at this time. 30. Cynthia Hooper, "Terror from Within;' and ''A Darker 'Big Deal': Concealing Party Crimes in the Post-WWII Era;' in Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention, ed. Juliane Fiirst (London: Routledge, 2006), 142-63. 31. For an overview of Soviet history during the Khrushchev years, see Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd, eds., The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). On Khrushchev-era cultural policy, see Nancy Condee, "Cultural Codes of the Thaw;' in Nikita Khrushchev, ed. William Taubman, Sergei Khrushchev, and Abbott Gleason (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 169-76; Priscilla Johnson and Leopold Labedz, eds., Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962-1964 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965); and Bittner, Many Lives. On changes in the Gulag, see Steven A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Alan Barenberg, Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and Its Legacy in Vorkuta (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); and JeffreyS. Hardy, "Khrushchev's Gulag: The Evolution of Punishment in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union, 1953-1964" (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2011). For an important study of the effects of Gulag returnees on Soviet politics and society, see Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). For two useful collections of recent scholarship on the Khrushchev era, see Polly Jones, ed., The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era (London: Routledge, 2006); and Melanie Ilic and Jeremy Smith, eds., Soviet State and Society under Nikita Khrushchev (London: Routledge, 2009). For a legal and political tract that captures many important elements of the Khrushchev-era regime's view of repression, see N. R. Mironov, Ukreplenie zakonnosti i pravoporiadka v obshchenarodnom gosudarstveProgrammnaia zadacha partii (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1969) (a work published under Brezhnev, but completed soon before the author's 1964 death). 32. See, for example, William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2003), as well as A. V. Pyzhikov, Khrushchevskaia ottepel', 1953-1964 (Moscow: OLMA-PRESS, 2002). Robert Hornsby provides a useful analysis of Khrushchev's vision of dissent in Protest, Reform and Repression in Khrushchev's Soviet Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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33. See, for example, B. Khanenko, Kakie neset obiazannosti i kakie imeet prava chien KPSS (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1963); G. Ukhov, Chego partiia trebuet ot kommunista (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1962); Markov, Byt; Moskovskii, Partiia vsego naroda; S. Indurskii, Lichnyi primer kommunista (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1962); Sutotskii, 10 millionov idushchikh; and Printsipy tvoei zhizni (Besedy o moral'nom kodekse stroitelia kommunizma) (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1963 ), 31. 34. Historians of the prewar Soviet Union have engaged in a lively debate on the extent to which Soviet citizens internalized the values of the regime; see, for example, the works of Kotkin and Hellbeck (cited above), as well as works like David Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin, 19271941 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); and Timothy Johnston, Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life under Stalin, 1939-1953 (London: Oxford University Press, 2011). This volume focuses on the narrower question of how effectively the regime shaped the behavioral norms of its elite (and the population more broadly) and of how well the regime mobilized party members to enforce those norms. 35. For a typical1959 journal article describing the regime's desire to spread Communist vospitanie as "the central question in the activity of our party" (referring specifically to the need to eliminate capitalist influences and to spread "intolerance for violations of the moral-ethical norms of socialist life;' such as hooliganism, drunkenness, and an "uncomradely attitude toward women''), see K. Zarodov, "Kommunisticheskaia soznatel'nost' mass:' Agitator: Zhurnal Tsentral'nogo komiteta kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza 12 (June 1959): 9-15. 36. For a discussion of Soviet corruption after World War II, suggesting that the era of postwar Stalinism was a key transitional period, see Hooper, "A Darker 'Big Deal;" and several articles by James Heinzen: "The Art of the Bribe': Corruption and Everyday Practice in the Late Stalinist USSR;' Slavic Review 66, no. 3 (Fall2007), 389-412; "A 'Campaign Spasm': Graft and the Limits of the 'Campaign' against Bribery after the Great Patriotic War;' in Furst, Late Stalinist Russia, 123-41; and "Corruption among Officials and Anticorruption Drives in the USSR, 1945-1964;' in Russian Bureaucracy and the State: Officialdom from Alexander III to Vladimir Putin, ed. Don K. Rowney and Eugene Huskey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 169-88. For material on corruption in the period after 1964, see William Clark, Crime and Punishment in Soviet Officialdom: Combating Corruption in the Political Elite, 1965-1990 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993); Alena Ledeneva, Russias Economy of Favors: Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Rasma Karklins, The System Made Me Do It: Corruption in Post-Communist Societies (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2005). 37. David L. Hoffmann looks at the party's informal behavioral code during the quarter-century after 1917 in his book Stalinist Values, noting that in its first years in power, the party's theorists argued that because "whatever advanced the cause of the proletarian state was morally correct," there was no need for a formal moral code (58-59). One leading text on the party's expectations of its members was Emelian Iaroslavskii's Chego partiia trebuet ot kommunista (Moscow: Partizdat TsK VKP(b), 1935). The party published surprisingly few pamphlets and books on this subject for much of the 1940s and 1950s, before printing a wide variety of texts on how Communists and citizens should behave in the early 1960s. 38. For the Moral Code itself, see Materialy XII s"ezda KPSS (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1962), 411. For a near-contemporary discussion of the code by a Western scholar, see RichardT. De George, Soviet Ethics and Morality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), ch. 5.

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39. The records of the KPK are located in the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI), but I examined many of these files through Chadwyck-Healey's microfilm collection "Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and Soviet State" (published in Cambridge, England, by the State Archival Service of Russia and the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace in association with Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1993-1994). Some KPK files have been moved to the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI), Fond 589. 40. Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 168. 41. For more on the concept of vospitanie, see George Avis, ed., The Making of the Soviet Citizen: Character Formation and Civic Training in Soviet Education (New York: Croom Helm, 1987); and J. L. Black, "Perestroika and the Soviet General School: The CPSU Loses Control of the Political Dimension of Vospitanie;' Canadian Slavonic Papers 33, no. 1 (March 1991): 1-18. 42. For two recent studies that touch on the relationship between repression and education in Soviet history, see Steven A. Barnes, Death and Redemption, and Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev's Cold Summer. 43. See, for example, Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956); and Aryeh Unger, The Totalitarian Party: Party and People in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974), which exemplify the interest of many scholars in propaganda. 44. See, for example, Hoffmann, Stalinist Values; Vadim Volkov, "The Concept of Kul'turnost': Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process:' in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 2000), 210-30; and Frances Lee Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007). 45. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, rev. ed., trans. Edmund Jephcott (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000). In 1978, Elias himselflinked trends like the growth of modesty and sexual puritanism in China and the Soviet Union to the need for post-revolutionary states to establish "a single code of conduct-a general discipline:' See Stanislas Fontaine, "The Civilizing Process Revisited: Interview with Norbert Elias:' Theory and Society 5, no. 2 (March 1978): 243-53, at 248.

Notes to Chapter One 1. "Ustav Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza:' Pravda, November 3, 1961, 1. 2. See Andreev, Darskii, and Kharkova, Naselenie sovetskogo soiuza, for Soviet population data, and the statistics in table 1 for the total number of Communists in each year. 3. As Jerry Hough notes, the Communist Party is difficult to define as an "elite" or "mass" organization, given its large membership in the adult male segment of certain social groups in particular. See Jerry Hough, "Party 'Saturation' in the Soviet Union;' in The Dynamics of Soviet Politics, ed. Paul Cocks et a!. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 117-33. The party included the country's political elite, after all, but it also included a large number of people who aspired to elite status (but had yet to attain it) or who were successful and prominent, but far from the pinnacle of Soviet society and politics.

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4. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1969), 34:93. 5. Spravochnik sekretaria pervichnoi partiinoi organizatsii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1960), 459-60. (Unless otherwise noted, all translations to English are my own.) 6. G. Ukhov, Chego partiia trebuet ot kommunista (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1962), 29. 7. For more on the size and composition of the party, see Rigby, Communist Party Membership; Hill and Frank, The Soviet Communist Party; and Hammer, The USSR. 8. For official discussions of this change, see Moskovskii, Partiia vsego naroda, 3-5; and E. I. Bugaev, Nasha leninskaia partiia (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1963), 20-36. 9. For a discussion of these rule changes, see Graeme Gill, The Rules of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1988), 41-43. 10. See, for example, Rigby, Communist Party Membership, 221-31. 11. XVIII s''ezd, 673. 12. See "Izmeneniia v ustave VKP(b);' Pravda, 22 March 1939, 2. 13. The congress's full resolution amending the party charter can be found in "Izmeneniia v ustave VKP(b );'Pravda, 22 March 1939, 2-3. For the new charter, see "Ustav kommunisticheskoi partii (bol'shevikov);' Pravda, 27 March 1939, 1. 14. See, for instance, Elena Zubkova, "Kadrovaia politika i chistki v KPSS ( 19451956);' Svobodnaia mysl' 1999:3,124. 15. See, for example, the data in table 4. 16. RGASPI f. 17, o. 7, d. 309, l. 137. 17. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 1, l. 11. 18. Between 1946 and 1953, the percentage of expelled Communists who were sluzhashchie was always 4-5 percent lower than the proportion of all Communists who were white-collar workers. See RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 26, l. 25, for figures on the class composition of the party, and RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 4, l. 160; f. 77, o. 1. d. 5, ll. 66, 159; f. 77, o. 1, d. 6, l. 66; f. 77, o. 1, d. 7, ll. 67, 163; f. 77, o. 1, d. 8, ll. 169, 170 for statistics on the class composition of expelled Communists. 19. See, for example, Hill and Frank, Soviet Communist Party, 33. 20. RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 26, l. 25. 21. S. A. Mirskov, Kogo partiia prinimaet v svoi riadi (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1964), 51-52. 22. See Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War, especially chapter 1, for more on the effects of World War II on the party. 23. See, for example, Kees Boterbloem, Life and Death under Stalin: Kalinin Province, 1945-1953 (Montreal: MeGill-Queen's University Press, 1999), chapter 4, for a discussion of efforts to ensure that young party members had absorbed the regime's values. 24. RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 26, l. 25. 25. For a discussion of the challenges of determining class identity in the early Soviet Union, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, ''Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia;' in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (New York: Routledge, 2000), 20-46. 26. "Ustav Kommunisticheskoi partii sovetskoi soiuza;' Pravda, 14 October 1952, 1. 27. See, for example, the data in table 1. 28. Spravochnik "KPSS v tsifrakh" na 1 ianvaria 1962 g. (RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 26, l. 21); and "KPSS v tsifrakh 1961-1964 gody;' Partiinaia zhizn' (May 1965): 8-17. 29. See Andreev, Darskii, and Kharkova, Naselenie sovetskogo soiuza, for information on the population's growth rate under Khrushchev.

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30. Ibid., 63, for 1959 population figures. 31. RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 8, 1. 175; and ibid., f. 77, o. 1, d. 9, 1. 20. 32. RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 9, 1. 20. 33. For the text of Khrushchev's remarks to the September Plenum (including a direct comparison between the Communists he hoped would volunteer for kolkhoz work and the "twenty-five-thousanders" who helped lead Stalin's collectivization drive), see RGANI f. 2, 0. 1, d. 48, 1. 179. 34. For more on the Virgin Lands campaign, see Michaela Pohl, "From White Grave to Tselinograd to Astana: The Virgin Lands Opening, Khrushchev's Forgotten First Reform," in The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s, ed. Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 269-307. 35. See, for example, 0. V. Khlevniuk et al., eds., Regional'naia politika N. S. Khrushcheva: TsK KPSS i mestnye partiinye komitety, 1953-1964 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009), 92-104. 36. For more on the under-examined topic of party reform in the 1950s and 1960s, see Barbara Ann Chotiner, Khrushchev's Party Reform: Coalition Building and Institutional Innovation (Westwood, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984); and Soo-Heon Park, "Party Reform and 'Volunteer Principle' under Khrushchev in Historical Perspective" (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1993). For a contemporary description of the "public principles" campaign, seeP. Bubnov, Na obshchestvennykh nachalakh (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1961). 37. For more on Khrushchev's populism, see Breslauer, Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders, esp. 52-58. 38. XX s'ezd Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1956), 2:425. 39. "KPSS v tsifrakh;' Partiinaia zhizn' 19 (October 1967): 8-20, at 11. 40. For the text of Khrushchev's speech and related documents, seeK. Eimermacher et al., eds., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva o kul'te lichnosti na XX s'ezde: Dokumenty (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002). For a recent analysis of the speech, see Polly Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-1970 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), ch. 1. 41. For official party publications explaining this new slogan, see Moskovskii, Partiia vsego naroda and Sutotskii, 10 millionov idushchikh. 42. "Programma Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza;' Pravda, 2 November 1961,9. 43. F. R. Kozlov, "KPSS-partiia vsego naroda;' Kommunist 39, no. 8 (May 1962): 10-21, at 10-11. 44. Ibid., 11. 45. In 1959, 31.4 percent of the overall population belonged to the peasantry and 68.3 percent to the proletariat and the sluzhashchie. See A. I. Gozulov and M. G. Grigor'iants, Narodnonaselenie SSSR (Statisticheskoe izuchenie chislennosti, sostava i razmeshcheniia) (Moscow: Moskva-Statistika, 1969), 114. Peasants were greatly underrepresented in the party; workers somewhat less so; sluzhashchie were overrepresented. 46. Kozlov, "KPSS-partiia vsego naroda;'12. 47. "KPSS v tsifrakh;' Partiinaia zhizn' 19 (October 1967): 8-20, at 11. 48. See, for example, Rigby, Communist Party Membership; David Granick, The Red Executive: A Study of the Organization Man in Russian Industry (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 35-37; Alfred G. Meyer, The Soviet Political System: An Interpretation (New York: Random House, 1965); and Aryeh L. Unger, "Political Participation in the USSR: YCL and CPSU;' Soviet Studies 33, no. 1 (January 1981): 107-24.

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49. Unger, "Political Participation;' 110. 50. Jerry Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union is Governed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 322. 51. Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System (hereafter HPSSS), "Schedule B, Vol. 3, Case 105," (Widener Library, Harvard University) 19-20. 52. See, for example, RGANI f. 356, o. 2, d. 10, I. 158. 53. HPSSS, "Schedule A, Vol. 3, Case 25;' 25. For a similar anecdote, see HPSSS "Schedule B, Vol. 12, Case 25;' 6; and HPSSS, "Schedule A, Vol. 23, Case 471;' 39. 54. Rigby, Communist Party Membership, 45. 55. Maurice Friedberg, How Things Were Done in Odessa: Cultural and Intellectual Pursuits in a Soviet City (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991). 56. HPSSS, "Schedule A, Vol. 16, Case 308;' 7. 57. Merle Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled: Revised Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 270ff. 58. See, for example, Iaroslavskii, Chego partiia trebuet, 26,60-71. 59. See Gill, Rules, 152. 60. See, for example, the statistics in table 1. 61. See, for example, Andreev, Darskii, and Kharkova, Naselenie sovetskogo soiuza, 63. 62. For the 1939 version of the party charter, see Pravda, 27 March 1939, 1. For discussions of the changing text of the charter over time, see Gill, Rules. 63. "Ustav kommunisticheskoi partii (bol'shevikov);' Pravda, 27 March 1939, 1. 64. See, for example, Yoram Gorlizki, "Party Revivalism and the Death of Stalin," Slavic Review 54, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 1-22; and Khrushchev's speech to the congress (Pravda, 13 October 1952, 1). 65. "Ustav Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskoi Soiuza;' Pravda, 14 October 1952, 1. 66. "Ustav Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza," Pravda, 3 November 1961, 1. 67. Ibid., 2. 68. For more on the introduction of the code, see Dobson, Khrushchev's Cold Summer, 210-12; and Field, Private Life, 9-12. 69. Materialy XII s'ezda KPSS, 411. 70. "Sud'ba dala mne shans;' beseda s F. M. Burlatskim, Rossiiskii advokat 5 (2007), http:/ /gra.ros-adv.ru/magazine.php?m=60&a=3 (accessed September 1, 2014). Archived in WebCite: http://www.webcitation.org/6GizcC06n 71. For more on Khrushchev's struggle with parasitism, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Social Parasites: How Tramps, Idle Youth, and Busy Entrepreneurs Impeded the Soviet March to Communism;' Cahiers du monde russe 47, nos. 1-2 (January-June 2006): 377 -408; Printsipy tvoei zhizni (besedy o moral'nom kodekse stroitelia kommunizma) (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1963), 31. 72. Printsipy tvoei zhizni, 50. 73. For more on the obshchestvennost' campaign, see Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual, ch. 7; LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev's Russia, ch. 4; and Dobson, Khrushchev's Cold Summer, ch. 5. For other reforms connected to the larger obshchestvennost' campaign, see Fitzpatrick, "Social Parasites;' 377-408; and Yoram Gorlizki, "Delegalization in Russia: Soviet Comrades' Courts in Retrospect;' The American Journal of Comparative Law 3 (1998): 403-25. For the Khrushchev-era invasion of citizens' privacy, a closely related trend, see Field, Private Life. For an analysis of the role of obshchestvennost' in Khrushchev-era literary debates, see Karl Loewenstein, "Obshchestvennost' as Key to Understanding Soviet Writers of the 1950s: Moskovskii Literator, October 1956-March 1957;' Journal of Contemporary History 44, no. 3 (July 2009): 474-75.

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74. See Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual, 286-88; and LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev's Russia, 139-142, on the violence of public organizations like the druzhina. The Communist Party's investigations of its members for drunkenness and mis-

conduct in the family could be highly coercive, even when they did not result in expulsion. 75. See Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, chapter 2, esp. 58-62. In 1924, as Hoffmann notes (62 ), the party's Central Control Commission issued a proclamation "on party ethics" promising to "decisively struggle against flagrant repudiations of proletarian class morality" and to enforce moral standards more uniformly, but the party's expectations of its members were never clearly stated in written form. 76. See Gill, Rules, 152. 77. For more on prewar views of party ethics, see M. A. Makarevich, ed., Partiinaia etika: Dokumenty i materialy diskussii 20-kh godov (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1989). 78. Iaroslavskii, Chego partiia trebuet, 79. (Italics in the original.) 79. Ibid., 77. 80. Ibid., 78. 81. Ibid., 76. 82. This instrumentalist vision arguably remained in force for years: see De George, Soviet Ethics and Morality, 39-41. 83. Iaroslavskii, Chego partiia trebuet, 89. 84. Ibid., 81. 85. Ibid., 87. 86. Ibid., 73. 87. Ibid., 49. 88. Gill, Rules, 113. 89. See, for example, Rigby, Communist Party Membership, 76-77,96-100, 178-83, and 201-4. For a discussion of how prewar purges worked, see J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), chapter 2. 90. See Elena Zubkova, "Kadrovaia politika i chistki v KPSS (1949-1953);' Svobodnaia mysl' 1999:4, 96-110; and ibid., 1999:6, 112-120, for more detail. 91. "Ustav kommunisticheskoi partii (bol'shevikov);' Pravda, 27 March 1939, 1. 92. See, for example, "Ustav Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza;' Pravda, 3 November 1961, 1. 93. "Ustav kommunisticheskoi partii (bol'shevikov);' Pravda, 27 March 1939, 1; and "Ustav Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza;' Pravda, 3 November 1961, 1. 94. See TTsDNI f. 32, o. 1, d. 787, 1. 29, for a 1961 case involving a reprimand with a "final warning:' 95. The "notation on the registration card" referred to in many censure resolutions was a brief note added to a list of demographic and work-related information about the Communist that was included in his personal file; the "registration card" (uchetnaia kartochka) was distinct from the "party card" (partiinyi bilet). 96. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 1, 11. 18-19. 97. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 811, 1. 29. 98. Spravochnik sekretaria, 539. 99. Tsentr dokumentatsii noveishei istorii Saratovskoi oblasti (hereafter TsDNISO) f. 1300, 0. 8, d. 90, 1. 121. 100. RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 896, 1. 18. 101. Gill, Rules, 59.

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102. There were two rare exceptions to this rule: some expelled Communists were told in an addendum (pripiska) to the expulsion resolution that they could ask their PPO to petition for their readmission if their behavior improved, while others were informed that they could reapply for party membership "under general circumstances" (vnov' na obshchikh osnovaniiakh ), as if they had never been in the party at all. 103. Strictly speaking, when a raikom voted to declare that someone had "mechanically left" the party, it was asserting that the Communist in question had left the party at the moment when he or she failed to pay dues. (The resolution itself did not exclude the Communist from the party, merely recognizing that he or she had already ceased to be a party member; the obkom did not need to approve a raikom's finding that a member had been "mechanically" or "automatically" excluded.) 104. See table 4 for a year-by-year breakdown. 105. Zubkova, "Kadrovaia politika (1945-1956):' 124. 106. See, for example, V. Kushteiko, "Chutko otnosit'sia k kazhdomu kommunistu:' Pravda, 9 April1951, 2. 107. Yuri Glazov, To Be or Not to Be in the Party: Communist Party Membership in the USSR (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), 105-6. 108. Gosudarstvennyi obshchestvenno-politicheskii arkhiv Permskoi oblasti (hereafter GOPAPO) f. 105, o. 196, d. 825, I. 8. 109. HPSSS, "Schedule B, Vol. 3, Case 10s:' 19. 110. See GOPAPO f. 105, o. 196, d. 867, I. 6, for the expulsion of a Communist accused of getting married in church. See GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 3, d. 49, I. 60, for a similar case that involved wife-beating;£ 2007, o. 3, d. 48, I. 112; £ 1300, o. 8, d. 170, I. 113; and f. 105, o. 259, d. 981, I. 3 (drinking cases); GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. 861, I. 5; and f. 105, o. 259, d. 411, I. 4 (drinking and family cases). 111. See, for example, RGANI f. 5, o. 15, d. 441, I. 183. 112. See, for example, RGANI f. 5, o. 15, d. 435, ll. 165-66; and ibid., d. 436, ll. 39-41. 113. HPSSS, "Schedule B, Vol. 3, Case 10s:' 10. 114. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 196, d. 406, I. 29. 115. RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 2826, I. 51. 116. RGANI £6, op. 4, d. 5, I. 21. 117. Meyer, Soviet Political System, 142. 118. For an example, see RGANI £ 6, o. 2, d. 1847, ll. 28-29. 119. See, for example, Spravochnik sekretaria, 540. 120. I. Boitsov, "0 sobliudenie trebovanii Ustava KPSS pri resheniia voprosov o chlenakh partii:' Kommunist (June 1957): 60-71, at 67. 121. See "Ustav Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza:' Pravda, 3 November 1961, 1, for the change in party expulsion procedures. 122. Spravochnik sekretaria, 541-42. 123. "Ustav Kommunisticheskoi partii sovetskoi soiuza:' Pravda, 14 October 1952, 1. 124. Hooper, "A Darker 'Big Deal:" 125. XVIII s'ezd, 678. 126. See, for example, RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 20; RGANI£ 77, o. 1, d. 26, I. 62; RGANI f. 6, o. 6, dd. 16, 17, 18, I. 1 in each case; d. 19, I. 5; dd. 20, 21, 22, 1017, 1020, 1081, 1085, 1167, 1171, 1174, I. 1 in each case. 127. See, for example, the remarks of a gorkom department head for cadres and of a gorkom secretary at the 1952 party conference for Ivanovskaia oblast. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Ivanovskoi oblasti (hereafter GAIO) f. 327, o. 9, d. 332, ll. 24-25; and ibid., f. 327, 0. 9, d. 333, I. 13.

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128. Gill, Rules, 59. 129. For a discussion of appeals and petitions to the KPK, see Eugenia Belova and Valery Lazarev, Funding Loyalty: The Economics of the Communist Party (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), ch. 7. 130. As Arch Getty notes, the KPK was created in 1934 with a mandate to investigate the workings of local party organizations, but its powers and its independence were gradually whittled away over time. J. Arch Getty, Pragmatists and Puritans: The Rise and Fall of the Party Control Commission, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian & East European Studies 1208 (Pittsburgh, PA: Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 1997). 131. RGANif. 6, o. 6, d. 16, 1. 1; ibid., d. 17, 1. 1; ibid., d. 18, 1. 1; Ibid., d. 19, 1. 5; Ibid., d. 20, 1. 1; Ibid., d. 21, 1. 1; Ibid., d. 22, 1. 1; Ibid., d. 1017,1. 1; Ibid., d. 1020,1. 1; Ibid., d. 1081, 1. 1; Ibid., d. 1085, 1. 1; Ibid., d. 1167, 1. 1; Ibid., d. 1171, 1. 1; Ibid., d. 1174, 1. 1. 132. See, for example, RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 949, 1. 47; RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1207, 11. 36-37; and RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1244, 1. 15, which all use variations on this phrase. 133. This argument was sometimes even true. A 1952 report on the work of the KPK, for example, noted several cases of officials punished for "the suppression of criticism'' (zazhim kritiki) after having their critics expelled from the party on fabricated charges. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 6, 11. 50-52. 134. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1068,11. 27-28. 135. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 203, d. 511, esp.l. 15. 136. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 203, d. 324, 1. 23. 137. For examples, see GOPAPO f. 105, o. 203, d. 701; and RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 184, 1. 152. 138. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 196, d. 825. 139. TTsDNI £ 147, o. 4, d. 1112,1. 1. 140. According to a report from Kalinin, 31.8 percent of Communists who lost their party card claimed to have done so on a streetcar. TTsDNI f. 147, o. 3, d. 2797,1. 41. 141. See GOPAPO f. 105, o. 237, dd. 95, 355, 615. 142. TTsDNI f. 2293, o. 1, d. 4, 1. 32. 143. TsDNISO f. 1300, o. 8, d. 95, 1. 85. 144. See Edward Cohn, "Disciplining the Party: The Expulsion and Censure of Communists in the Post-War Soviet Union, 1945-1961" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2007), 355-66, for more on this theme. 145. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. 891, 1. 4. 146. TTsDNI f. 32, o. 1, d. 400, 1. 74. 147. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. 291. 148. In short, very few confessions at postwar party discipline hearings resembled the sort of confessions from the 1930s described in works like Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 49-51. 149. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 203, d. 492, 1. 14. 150. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 203, d. 492, 1. 7. 151. GOPAPO £ 105, o. 203, d. 492, 1. 11. 152. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 203, d. 492,11. 15-16. 153. Mirskov, Kogo partiia prinimaet, 66. 154. See, for example, the Short Course's discussion of the Menshevik-Bolshevik split. Istoriia Vsesoiuznoi Kommunisticheskoi partii (bol'shevikov). With an afterword by Roy A. Medvedev (1938; repr., Moscow: Golos, 2004). 155. Wendell L. Willkie, One World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1943), 30.

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156. Mirskov, Kogo partiia prinimaet, 36. 157. E. I. Bugaev and B. M. Leibzon, Besedy ob ustave KPSS (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1962), 88. 158. A. Bezymenskii, "Partbilet;' in Partbilet No. 224332: Stikhi o Lenine (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1930), 82-85. 159. See Lilia Kaganovsky, "Visual Pleasure in Stalinist Cinema: Ivan Pyrev's Ihe Party Card;' in Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside, ed. Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 35-60. 160. TTsDNI f. 32, o. 1, d. 346, l. 68. 161. RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 11, l. 63. 162. The Soviet leadership announced at least two campaigns against party interference in court cases, under Khrushchev in 1954 and Gorbachev in 1986. See, for example, Peter H. Solomon, Jr., "Soviet Politicians and Criminal Prosecutions: The Logic of Party Intervention;' in Cracks in the Monolith: Party Power in the Brezhnev Era, ed. James R. Millar, (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), 3-32; and Yoram Gorlizki, "Political Reform and Local Party Interventions under Khrushchev," in Reforming Justice in Russia, 1864-1996: Power, Culture, and the Limits ofLegal Order, ed. Peter H. Solomon, Jr. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 256-81. The relationship between the party and the courts is also discussed in Peter H. Solomon, Jr., "Local Political Power and Soviet Criminal Justice, 1922-1941," Soviet Studies 27, no. 3 (July 1985): 305-29; and Robert Sharlet, "The Communist Party and the Administration of Justice in the USSR;' in Soviet Law After Stalin, vol. 3, Soviet Institutions and the Administration ofLaw, ed. Donald D. Barry, F. J. M. Feldbrugge, George Ginsburgs, and Peter Maggs (Alphen aan den Rijn: Sijthoff and Noordhoff, 1979), 321-92. 163. RGANI f. 6, o. 1, d. 12, l. 12. 164. Gorlizki, "Political Reform;' 280. 165. See, for example, GOPAPO f. 105, o. 203, d. 359; and ibid., o. 196, d. 27. 166. Sharlet, "The Communist Party;' 328-34. 167. Gorlizki, "Political Reform:' 168. "Ustav Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza;' Pravda, 14 October 1952, 1. 169. See chapter 4. 170. Materialy XXII s'ezda, 434. 171. See Hooper, ''A 'Darker Big Deal;" as well as chapter 4. 172. "Ustav Kommunisticheskoi partii sovetskoi soiuza," Pravda, 14 October 1952, 1.

Notes to Chapter Two 1. TsDNISO f. 1300, o. 8, d. 82, l. 76. 2. TsDNISO f. 1300, o. 8, d. 82, ll. 76-77. 3. For more on the demographic effects of World War II on the USSR, see Ellman and Maksudov, "Soviet Deaths;' 671-80; and Poliakov and Zhiromskaia, Naselenie Rossii, vol. 2, chs. 2-8. 4. See, for example, Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941-1945: A Study of Occupation Politics, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981); Karel Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004); and Norbert Kunz, Die Krim unter deutscher Herrschaft 1941-1944: Germanisierungsutopie und Besatzungsrealitiit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005). For a case study of the impact of World War II on the Vinnytsia Province of Ukraine,

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see Weiner, Making Sense of War. Chapter 7 ofHiroaki Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1930s-1990s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 259-95, discusses the occupation of the Donetsk basin. Articles on related issues include Jeffrey W. Jones, "'Every family has its freak': Perceptions of Collaboration in Occupied Soviet Russia, 1943-1948;' Slavic Review 64, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 747-70; Tanja Penter, "Collaboration on Trial: New Source Material on Soviet Postwar Trials against Collaborators;' Slavic Review 64, no. 4 (Winter 2005), 782-90; Martin Dean, "Where Did All the Collaborators Go?;' Slavic Review 64, no. 4 (Winter 2005), 791-98; and Sergei Kudriashov, "Predateli, 'osvoboditeli' ili zhertvy voiny? Sovetskii kollaborationizm (1941-1942);' Svobodnaia mysl' 14 (1993): 84-98. Kees Boterbloem briefly discusses collaboration in Kalinin Province in Life and Death under Stalin, 45-48 and 55-58. Some of the same themes are also discussed in Martin J. Blackwell, "Regime City of the First Category: The Experience of the Return of Soviet Power to Kyiv, Ukraine, 1943-1946," (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2005). 5. See Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station. 6. See, for example, Alec Nove, An Economic History of the U.S.S.R. (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), ch. 10; Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Post-War Soviet Society: The 'Return to Normalcy; 1945-1953;' in The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union, ed. Susan J. Linz (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985), 130; and Susan J. Linz, "World War II and Soviet Economic Growth, 1940-1953;' in Linz, The Impact of World War II, 13. 7. See Oleg Mozokhin, "Statistika repressivnoi deiatel'nosti organov bezopasnosti SSSR;' http:/ /istmat.info/node/296. 8. See, for example, Tania Penter, "Collaboration on Trial;' and "Local Collaborators on Trial: Soviet War Crimes Trials under Stalin (1943-1953);' Cahiers du monde russe 49, nos. 2-3 (April-September 2008): 341-64. 9. Sergey Kudryashov and Vanessa Voisin, "The Early Stages of 'Legal Purges' in Soviet Russia (1941-1945);' Cahiers du monde russe 49, nos. 2-3 (April-September 2008): 263-96. 10. See, for example, Olaf Mertelsmann and Aigi Rahi-Tamm, "Cleansing and Compromise: The Estonian SSR in 1944-1945;' Cahiers du monde russe 49, nos. 2-3 (April-September 2008): 319-40. 11. For an overview of the plight facing POWs, see Mark Edele, Soviet Veterans, 102-28; V. P. Naumov, "Sud'ba voennplennykh i deportirovannykh grazhdan SSSR: Materialy komissii po reabilitatsii zhertv politicheskikh represii;' Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 2 (1996): 91-112; Pavel Polian, Zhertvy dvukh diktatur: Ostarbaitery i voennoplennye v tret'em reikhe i ikh repatriatsiia (Moscow: Vash vybor TsiRZ, 1996); Polian, "The Internment of Returning Soviet Prisoners of War after 1945;' in Prisoners of War, Prisoners of Peace, ed. Bob Moore and Barbara Hately-Broad (New York: Berg, 2005), 123-39; Viktor Zemskov, "K voprosu o repatriatsii sovetskikh grazhdan 1944-1951 gg.;' Istoriia SSSR, no. 2 (1990): 26-41. For more on repatriated guest workers, see Vanessa Voisin, "Retribute or Reintegrate? The Ambiguity of Soviet Policies towards Repatriates: The Case of Kalinin Province, 1943-1950:' Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 55, no. 1 (2007): 34-55. 12. See, for example, Tanja Penter and Dmitrii Titarenko, "Local Memory on War, German Occupation and Postwar Years: An Oral History Project in the Donbass;' Cahiers du monde russe 52, no. 2 (2011): 480. 13. For Weiner's pioneering study of the purge in Vinnytsia Province, see Weiner, Making Sense of War, ch. 2. For a study of the purge in Kalinin Province, see Vanessa Voisin, "Caught between War Repressions and Party Purge: The Loyalty ofKalinin Party Members Put to the Test of the Second World War;' Cahiers du monde russe 52, no. 2 (2011): 341-71.

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14. Membership in the Communist Party stood at 3,872,465 in early 1945, and the total number of expellees was at least 150,000. Spravochnik "KPSS v tsifrakh" na 1 ianvaria 1962 g., found in RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 26, I. 19. In 1941, Ukraine's Communist party had 564,536 members (Tsentral'nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv hromads'kykh ob'iednan' Ukrainy [hereafter TsDAHOU] f. 1, o. 23, d. 1511, I. 57), and the postwar purge in the republic led to the expulsion of at least 80,000 Communists (TsDAHOU f. 1, o. 46, d. 5337, I. 35), which would suggest an expulsion rate of at least 14 percent. 15. Weiner, Making Sense of War, ch. 2, esp. 82-85. 16. Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror, 275. 17. Amir Weiner and Vanessa Voisin also note the importance of passivity in occupation cases. See Weiner, Making Sense of War, 85; and Voisin, "Caught between War Repressions:' 364-65. 18. Weiner, Making Sense of War, 82. 19. The Ukrainian Central Committee's 19 April1946 resolution calls for "everyday struggle for the purity of the party's ranks;' for example. TsDAHOU f. 1, o. 6, d. 918, I. 5. 20. Just as the literature on the Soviet purge has usually underplayed the larger European context, so has the literature on European retribution largely ignored the Soviet purge. Works such as Istvan Deak, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt, eds., The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) largely ignore the Soviet Union. But see Robert Gildea, Olivier Wieviorka, and Anette Warring, eds., Surviving Hitler and Mussolini: Daily Life in Occupied Europe (New York: Berg, 2006) for a work that does begin to place Soviet retribution efforts in their European context. 21. Istvan Deak, introduction to Deak, Gross, and Judt, The Politics ofRetribution, 3-4. 22. Benjamin Frommer, National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (New York: Cambridge: University Press, 2005), ch. 1. 23. Andrew Rigby, Justice and Reconciliation: After the Violence (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), 26. 24. Peter Romijn, '"Restoration of Confidence': The Purge of Local Government in the Netherlands as a Problem of Postwar Reconstruction;' in Deak, Gross, and Judt, The Politics of Retribution in Europe, 173-93. 25. Luc Huyse, "The Criminal Justice System as a Political Actor in Regime Transitions: The Case of Belgium, 1944-SO;' in Deak, Gross, and Judt, The Politics of Retribution, 161. 26. There is a large literature discussing postwar retribution in France. See, for example, Peter Novick, Ihe Resistance versus Vichy: The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 186. Other works discussing the French retribution campaign include Herbert Lottman, The Purge (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1986); Megan Koreman, The Expectation of Justice: France, 19441946 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); and Richard L. Golsan, "The Legacy of World War II in France: Mapping the Discourses of Memory;' in Ihe Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, ed. Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 73-101. 27. Quoted in Novick, Resistance versus Vichy, 147. 28. Koreman, Expectation of Justice, 96-97; and Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 46. 29. Novick, Resistance versus Vichy, 145. 30. Ibid., 145-48; and Judt, Postwar, 46. 31. See Frommer, National Cleansing, 371-72, for the text of the decree. 32. Ibid., 209-10.

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33. Ibid., 204. 34. Benjamin Frommer, "Denouncers and Fraternizers: Gender, Collaboration, and Retribution in Bohemia and Moravia during the Second World War and After;' in Gender and War in 20th-Century Eastern Europe, ed. Maria Bucur-Deckard and Nancy Wingfield (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 111-32. 35. See, for example, Anette Warring, "Intimate and Sexual Relations;' in Surviving Hitler and Mussolini: Daily Life in Occupied Europe, ed. Robert Gildea, Olivier Wieviorka, and Anette Warring (New York: Berg, 2006), 88-128; Anette Warring, "War, Cultural Loyalty and Gender: Danish Women's Intimate Fraternization;' in Children of World War II: The Hidden Enemy Legacy, ed. Kjersti Ericsson and Eva Simonsen (New York: Berg, 2005), 35-52; and Fabrice Virgili, Shorn Women: Gender and Punishment in Liberation France, trans. John Flower (New York: Berg, 2002), 15-28. 36. See, for example, Philip Towle, Margaret Kosuge, and Yoichi Kibata, eds., Japanese Prisoners of War (New York: Hambledon and London, 2000), and Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War (New York: Penguin, 2009). 37. See, for example, John W Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W W Norton & Company, 1999), 51-53, 58-64; Yoshikuni Igarashi, "Belated Homecomings: Japanese Prisoners of War in Siberia and Their Return to PostWar Japan;' in Moore and Hately-Broad, Prisoners of War, 105-22; and Ulrich Straus, The Anguish of Surrender: Japanese POWs of World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003). See Edward J. Drea, Japan's Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall, 1853-1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009) for a discussion of attitudes toward surrender and captivity in the Japanese imperial army. 38. Robert Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001 ), 113-15. 39. Andreas Hilger, "Re-Educating the German Prisoners of War: Aims, Methods, Results, and Memory in East and West Germany;' in Moore and Hately-Broad, Prisoners of War, 61-75; Matthias Reiss, "The Nucleus of a New German Ideology? The Re-Education of German Prisoners of War in the United States during World War II;' in Moore and Hately-Broad, Prisoners of War, 91-102. Maria Teresa Giusti, "Anti-Fascist Propaganda among Italian Prisoners of War in the USSR, 1941-46;' in Moore and Hately-Broad, Prisoners of War, 83. 40. See, for example, Susan L. Carruthers, "Redeeming the Captives: Hollywood and the Brainwashing of America's POWs in Korea;' Film History 10 (1998), 275-94; and Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 92-95. 41. See Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 154-55. 42. Ibid., 174-75. 43. Frommer, National Cleansing, 220. 44. Koreman, Expectation ofJustice, ch. 3, esp. 97-100. 45. See, for example, TsDAHOU f. 1, o. 46, d. 5337, l. 35. 46. Judt, Postwar, 46. 47. See, for example, Ellman and Maksudov, "Soviet Deaths:' 48. Judt, Postwar, 46. 49. TsDAHOU f. 1, o. 46, d. 5337, l. 35. These are not final statistics (since this report also mentioned 2,715 Communists whose cases still needed to be heard at the district level), but the final results are unlikely to have been significantly different. 50. Weiner, Making Sense of War, 94-95. 51. TsDAHOU f. 1, o. 6, d. 698, ll. 1-3.

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52. RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 98, ll. 76, 90. 53. See Voisin, "Caught Between War Repressions;' 347. 54. TsDAHOU f. 1, o. 6, d. 698, ll. 1-3. 55. By January 1, 1945, Ukrainian party membership had reached 164,743-under a third of the total from 1941,564,536. TsDAHOU f. 1, o. 23, d. 1511,1. 57. 56. See Voisin, "Caught Between War Repressions;' for the fear that a PPO's members would exonerate an accused Communist because they too had remained on occupied territory. The relative lenience of low-ranking party committees can also be seen as evidence for Jeffrey Jones's belief that many Soviet citizens recognized the ambiguities in their peers' wartime behavior ("Every family"). 57. TsDAHOU f. 1, o. 46, d. 305, 1. 13. 58. Ibid., 1. 8. 59. Ibid., ll. 9-10. 60. TsDAHOU f. 1, o. 6, d. 918, ll. 3-6. 61. Ibid., ll. 3-4. 62. Ibid., ll. 5-6. 63. RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 98, 1. 97. 64. Ibid., 1. 79. In Kalinin, similarly, many Communists were expelled in absentia, with no discussion by party authorities. See RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 98, 1. 179. 65. Ibid., 1. 90. 66. Ibid., 1. 177. 67. Ibid., 1. 76. 68. Jones, "Every familY:' 69. See, for example, TsDAHOU f. 46, o. 1, d. 5337. 70. See, for example, Edward Cohn, "Disciplining the Party;' 287-90. 71. TsDAHOU f. 1, o. 46, d. 5337, ll. 1, 3, 59, 12, and 14. 72. See, for example, GOPAPO £ 105, o. 203, d. 527, 1. 6. 73. See, for instance, TsDAHOU f. 1, o. 46, d. 1588. 74. For one example, see TTsDNI f. 147, o. 4, d. 402, 1. 40; further study of this theme will need to await the opening of police archives in Russia and Ukraine. 75. See Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, esp. ch. 9, for the effects of the Ukrainian occupation. 76. See Weiner, Making Sense of War, 95-96, for instance. 77. See, for example, TsDAHOU f. 1, o. 46, d. 304, 1. 6; and ibid., d. 305, 1. 3. 78. See the resolutions authorizing and accelerating the purge in 1943 and 1946: TsDAHOU f. 1, o. 6, d. 698, ll. 1-3; and ibid., d. 918, 1. 5. 79. For a discussion of the conduct of Soviet citizens under occupation see Jones, "Every family;' and Olga Kucherenko, "Reluctant Traitors: The Politics of Survival in Romanian-Occupied Odessa;' European Review of History-Revue europeenne d'histoire 15, no. 2 (April2008), 143-55. 80. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1864, 1. 128, describes a German-appointed starosta who won a prize for his work for the occupiers. RGANI £ 6, o. 2, d. 1446, 1. 107, describes the case of a policeman for the Germans given a ten-year sentence, whereas RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1473, 1. 103, describes the expulsion of a woman whose husband served in the police. See RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1434,1. 96, for the case of a Gestapo translator. 81. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 203, d. 637. 82. See RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1314,1. 147, for the case of a veteran who concealed his father's work as the elder (starosta) on a German-organized commune and conviction as a traitor (predatel').

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83. Penter and Titarenko, "Local Memory on War;' 491. 84. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. lll5, l. 52; and TTsDNI f. 147, o. 3, d. 2704, l. 183. For six Communists expelled for helping with snow removal, see TTsDNI £ 147, o. 3, d. 2704, ll. 60, 147, 149, 183; and ibid., o. 4, d. 25, ll. 4, 25. 85. See, for example, Laurie Cohen, Smolensk under the Nazis: Everyday Life in Occupied Russia (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013), 66-67. 86. See RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 931, l. 71, for a welder told by the Germans that he would be shot if he did not help them repair a bridge. RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 1972, l. 9, describes a man given a choice between moving to Germany and becoming a policeman. 87. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. ll25, ll. 30-31, describes a man who registered with one such board looking for work as a painter; another registered for work as a pedagogue (RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1285, l. 47). 88. RGANI £ 6, o. 2, d. 1215, l. 18. 89. Kucherenko, "Reluctant Traitors;' 144-45. 90. TsDAHOU f. 1, o. 23, d. 689, ll. 32-33. 91. Preliminary statistics from nine Ukrainian provinces suggest that 27 percent of Communists under occupation registered with the police. See TsDAHOU f. 46, o. 1, d. 305, l. 2. 92. See, for instance, RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 964, ll. 39-40; ibid., d. 968, l. 32; and ibid., d. 983, l. 83. 93. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 968, l. 32; and ibid., d. 953, l. 103. 94. Ibid., d. 1005, l. 21; ibid., d. 983, l. 59; and ibid., d. 1285, l. 47. 95. Ibid., d. 1446, l. 107. 96. RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 362, l. 123. 97. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 934, l. 93. 98. See RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1067, ll. 82-83; ibid., d. 949, l. 34; and ibid., d. 1089, ll. 87-88. 99. For a description of these anti-party attitudes, see Manley, To the Tashkent Station, 107-11. 100. See RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1004, ll. 27-28, for one example. 101. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1026, l. 62. 102. See cases at TTsDNI f. 147, o. 4, d. 25, ll. 2 and 70. 103. RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 15, ll. 21, 42. 104. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. ll08, l. 95. 105. TsDAHOU f. 1, o. 46, d. 3856. 106. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. ll61, l. 77. 107. Derzhavnyi arkhiv Kyivs'koi oblasti (hereafter DAKO) f. p-5/17, o. 1, d. 3120. 108. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 945, ll. 103-4. 109. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1408, l. 162. 110. RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 232, l. 54. lll. See, for example, DAKO f. p-5, o. 3, d. 35, ll. 61-62. ll2. RGASPif. 17, o. 122, d. 190, l. 2. 113. Ibid., d. 98, l. 176. 114. See, for example, Roger Markwick and Euridice Charon Cardona, Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Anna Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Reina Pennington, Wings, Women, and War: Soviet Airwomen in World War II Combat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001); Adrienne

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Harris, "The Myth of the Woman Warrior and World War II in Soviet Culture" (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 2008); and Kenneth Slepyan, Stalin's Guerillas: Soviet Partisans in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 195-202. ll5. See, for example, Jeffrey Burds, "Gender and Policing in Soviet West Ukraine, 1944-1948;' Cahiers du monde russe 42, nos. 2-3 (April-December 2001): 279-320. ll6. TTsDNI f. 146, o. 3, d. 2704, I. 81. ll7. TsDAHOU f. 1, o. 50, d. ll61, I. 39. ll8. For similar cases from Krasnodar and Estonia, see RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1325, I. 90; and ibid., f. 6, o. 6, d. 1575, 11. 4-6. 119. Jones, "Every family;' 762-63. 120. TTsDNI£ 147, o. 4, d. llll, I. 3. 121. See, for example, RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1229, I. 96. 122. For representative examples, see RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1443, I. 146; and ibid., o. 4, d. 2615, 11. 6-8. 123. RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 98, I. 99. 124. See RGANI f. 6, o. 6, dd. 17, 18, 19, 21, 22. These statistics do not include data for 1949. 125. See "Prikaz Stavki Verkhovnogo Glavnogo Komandovaniia Krasnoi Armii No. 270 (16 avgusta 1941g.);' Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 9 (1988): 26-28. 126. Edele, Soviet Veterans, ch. 5. 127. Roger Reese, Why Stalin's Soldiers Fought: The Red Army's Military Effectiveness in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 20ll), 199-200. 128. See RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 735, I. 50, for the case of a POW exiled to Kemerovo for joining the Turkestani legion, and RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 943, 11. ll-12, for a POW sentenced to ten years for running a factory that manufactured machinery for the Germans. 129. See, for example, RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1408, I. 163. 130. See, for example, GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. 535, I. 4; and ibid., d. 1091, I. 2. 131. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. 941, I. 4. 132. See RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1344, I. 122; and ibid., f. 6, o. 2, d. 1018, I. 46. 133. RGANI £ 6, o. 3, d. 528, I. 17. For a man who buried his weapon before his capture, see RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. ll47, I. ll8; for a man who gave his gun to a local resident for safe-keeping, see RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1578, I. 70. 134. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1219,11. 38-39. 135. Ibid., d. 1397, 11. 163-64. 136. Ibid., d. 991, I. 106. 137. RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 923, I. 5; ibid., o. 2, d. 1565, I. 126; ibid., d. 1413, I. 169; ibid., 0. 3, d. 314, I. 120. 138. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 991, I. 106. 139. Ibid., o. 6, d. 36, 11. 2, 5. 140. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1477, I. 205. 141. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 196, d. 181,11. 17-18. 142. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 196, d. 181, I. 9. 143. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1732,11. 95-96. 144. RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 381, I. 20. 145. See, for example, GOPAPO f. 105, o. 203, dd. 13, 38,278, and 737. 146. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1415, I. 151. 147. Ibid., d. 1349, I. 5. 148. Reese, Why Stalin's Soldiers Fought, 161-65.

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Notes to Chapter Three

1. TsDNISO f. 1300, o. 1, d. 122, 11. 80-81. 2. For the repression of the postwar years, see Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, and Zubkova, Russia after the War, chs. 12-13. 3. As Robert Hornsby notes, "anti-Soviet" was the term most often used by the authorities to describe oppositional, dissenting, or seditious actions in the Khrushchev years-a fact also true of the late Stalin era. Hornsby, Protest, Reform, and Repression, 14. 4. For more on dissent in the Khrushchev years, see Vladimir Kozlov, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Sergei Mironenko, eds., Sedition: Everyday Resistance in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev and Brezhnev (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011); Hornsby, Protest, Reform, and Repression; and Erik Kulavig, Dissent in the Years of Khrushchev: Nine Stories about Disobedient Russians (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). These works begin to challenge the idea of a clean break between the Stalin and Khrushchev years (see Kozlov, "The Meaning of Sedition;' in Sedition, 44, on the "myth'' of Khrushchev's liberalism). There has yet to be an overall study of dissenting opinion in the late Stalin years, although a number of sources (listed below) deal with that topic in part. 5. See, for example, RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 6, l. 174. 6. For more on the Khrushchev-era Gulag, see Marc Elie, "Khrushchev's Gulag: The Soviet Penitentiary System after Stalin's Death, 1953-1964;' in Kozlov and Gilburd, The Thaw, 109-42; Alan Barenberg, Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and Its Legacy in Vorkuta (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), esp. chs. 4 and 5; and Barnes, Death and Redemption, ch. 6. For a journal article emphasizing the decline in expulsions under Khrushchev, see "KPSS v tsifrakh ( 1956-1961 gg. );' Partiinaia zhizn', no. 1 (January 1962): 47; for a KPK report making a similar case, see RGANI £ 6, o. 6, d. 1163, l. 2. 7. See, for example, Cynthia Hooper, "What Can and Cannot Be Said: Between the Stalinist Past and the New Soviet Future;' Slavonic and East European Review 86, no. 2 (April2008): 306-27. 8. For more on the repressive politics of this period, see Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War, 117 -38; and Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace. 9. See, for example, Kees Boterbloem, The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 18961948 (Montreal: MeGill-Queen's University Press, 2004); Nikolai Krementsov, The Cure: A Story of Cancer and Politics from the Annals ofthe Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); G. V. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina: Vlast' i antisemitizm (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2003); and Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov, eds., Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); and David Brandenberger, "Stalin's Last Crime? Recent Scholarship on Postwar Soviet Antisemitism and the Doctor's Plot," Kritika 6, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 187-205. 10. Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror. 11. See, for example, RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 6, l. 174. 12. See, for example, Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, ch. 8. 13. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 25, l. 1. "Misdeeds of a political character" were defined as participation in "anti-Soviet conversations;' the "slandering of Soviet reality;' the concealment of past participation in an opposition faction, and the lack of political vigilance. 14. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1113,11. 27-28. The term blat refers to a system involving the exchange of goods and favors as a means to survive in difficult times or get ahead in society. 15. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1180, l. 71.

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16. See also RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1463, ll. 31-32; f. 6, o. 2, d. 1089, l. 48; f. 6, o. 2, d. 1682, 1. 142; and f. 6, o. 3., d. 383, 1. 22. 17. For a representative case involving a Leningrad State University professor accused of exaggerating the US role in defeating Hitler and praising US imperialism, see RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 943, ll. 8, 20-21. 18. See, for example, RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1905, ll. 27-28 (for a Jewish propagandist in the army who gave an "unparty-like" summary of cosmopolitanism); and RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 97, L 3 (for the case of a Jewish newspaper writer expelled in 1950 for "spread[ing] the ideas of bourgeois cosmopolitanism in the pages of the newspaper" in several reviews). RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 91, L 37, describes the case of a man who had belonged to a "Zionist" group from 1924 to 1928 and was expelled in 1950 for illegally changing his name, denying that the cultural group he belonged to was a spy organization, and criticizing the Stalinist definition of the term "nation" (natsiia). 19. On the rise of anti-Semitism in postwar Soviet politics, see Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina and Rubenstein and Naumov, Stalin's Secret Pogrom. 20. In 1949, there were 245,007 Jews in the party out of a total of 6,352,572 members (3.86 percent). RGANI £ 77, o. 1, d. 6, L 75. 21. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 1574, ll. 3-4. 22. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii (hereafter GARF) f. 9120, o. 2, d. 715, 11. 208-11. 23. RGANI f. 5, o. 15, d. 435, ll. 60-63, 68. 24. See, for example, Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia;' in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (New York: Routledge, 2000), 20-46; and Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin's Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926-1936 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 25. RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 326, l. 188. 26. See Chris Burton, "Medical Welfare during Late Stalinism: A Study of Doctors and the Soviet Health System, 1945-53" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2000), for more on the importance of expertise. 27. Consider the case of Comrade N, cited above, as well as the case of an administrator from the same factory who was said by a comrade to belong to a family with a "proprietary tendency" when his kulak roots were revealed. (TsDNISO f. 1300, o. 1, d. 113, L 278.) 28. See, for example, RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 645, L 73, for a Communist whose case began when he told the party that he had given it incorrect information on his social origins. 29. See, for example, RGANI f. 6, o. 3., d. 29, L 21; and ibid., o. 2, d. 1829, L 119. (Naftal Naftalievich claimed to be ethnically Cherkessian.) In another case, a Jew named Abram tvovich claimed to be an Armenian with the unlikely name Ibragim Leonidovich (RGANI, f. 6, o. 3, d. 381, L 39), while an ethnic German with the name Adol'f claimed to be an ethnic Russian named Anatolii (RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1534, L 51). 30. For more on the changing nature of Soviet nationalism, see Terry Martin, "Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordialism;' in Fitzpatrick, Stalinism, 348-67. 31. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1093, l. 90. 32. For a case in which an ethnically ambiguous Communist was accused of changing his identity from Ukrainian to German, see RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1403, ll. 170-71. 33. See RGASPI f. 17, o. 7, d. 309, L 138, for information on the 1921 and 1929 purges, and RGASPI f. 17, o. 7, d. 429, L 8, for 1933.

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34. RGASPI f. 17, o. 7, d. 440, l. 94. As late as the first half of 1938, 590 Communists were expelled as kulaks, compared to a mere 13 accused of concealing their social origins (RGASPI f. 17, o. 7, d. 346, ll. 1-2). 35. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 130-32. 36. For more on that policy, see Getty, Origins of the Great Purges, 70. 37. For two representative cases, see RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1011, l. 90; and ibid., d. 1117, l. 29. 38. For a discussion of the Twenty-Second Congress, see Taubman, Khrushchev, 513-16. 39. "Rech' N. M. Shvernika;' Pravda, 26 October 1961,3. 40. Ibid., 4. 41. See, for example, Julie Fedor, Russia and the Cult of State Security: The Chekist Tradition,from Lenin to Putin (New York: Routledge, 2011), 52; and Kozlov eta!., Sedition, 44. 42. Kozlov et a!., Sedition, 44-45. 43. See Taubman, Khrushchev, 310-23. 44. See, for example, Hornsby, Protest, Reform, and Repression, ch. 1; and Polly Jones, "From the Secret Speech to the Burial of Stalin: Real and Ideal Responses to De-Stalinization;' in Jones, Dilemmas of De-Stalinization. 45. Jones, "From the Secret Speech;' 44. 46. See Hornsby, Protest, Reform, and Repression, ch. 3; and Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma, for more on this theme. 47. TTsDNI f. 147, o. 6, d. 757, l. 54. 48. For the cases of two other drunken Communists who made politically unacceptable comments about the personality cult at party meetings, see RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 3038, l. 5; and ibid., d. 2067, l. 7. 49. Hornsby, Protest, Reform, and Repression, 77. 50. Jones, "From the Secret Speech;' 44. 51. RGANI f. 6, o. 5, d. 897, ll. 8-9. 52. Hornsby, Protest, Reform, and Repression, 24. 53. Kozlov et al., Sedition, 202. 54. Ibid., 48. 55. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 1161, l. 15. See Vladimir Kozlov, Mass Uprisings in the USSR: Protest and Rebellion in the Post-Stalin Years (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), ch. 2, for a discussion of unrest in the Khrushchev-era military. 56. See, for example, tables 4 and 11. 57. Alexander Titov, "The 1961 Party Programme and the Fate of Khrushchev's Reforms;' in Soviet State and Society under Nikita Khrushchev, ed. Melanie Ilic and Jeremy Smith (London: Routledge, 2009), 8-25. 58. Marc Elie, "Les anciens detenus du Goulag: Liberations massives, reinsertion et rehabilitation dans l'URSS poststalinienne, 1953-1964" (PhD diss., CEcole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2007), 346-47. 59. For more on Khrushchev's portrayal of the party as a victim of Stalin, see Hooper, "What Can and Cannot;' 306-27. 60. Albert P. Van Goudoever, The Limits of Destalinization in the Soviet Union: Political Rehabilitations in the Soviet Union since Stalin (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), ch. 1. 61. D. N. Ushakov, Tolkovyi slovar' russkogo iazyka (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Astrel: 2000), 3:1302. 62. For more on this theme, see Cynthia Hooper, "Terror from Within;' 322-24.

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63. See, for example, Nand Adler, The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 27-28. 64. See Jane Shapiro, "Rehabilitation Policy and Political Conflict in the Soviet Union, 1953-1964" (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1967), 5-9, for more on this theme. 65. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 1017, l. 1. 66. One report says that the KPK restored 3,597 living purge victims and rehabilitated another 1,713 deceased Communists (5,310 total); another report says that the KPK restored 5,456 Communists in that same period. See RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 1165, l. 31 and l. 32. 67. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 1165, l. 2. 68. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. 341, l. 39. 69. Ibid., l. 7. 70. Ibid., ll. 1-67. 71. See Adler, Gulag Survivor, 179-81, on the difficulty of gathering testimonials. 72. Kathleen E. Smith, "Living Links to Lenin: Old Bolsheviks, Party Veterans, and Thaw Policies" (unpublished paper presented at the 2004 AAASS convention). 73. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 1165, l. 31. 74. Ibid., ll. 2-4. 75. Ibid., l. 2. 76. See, for example, Taubman, Khrushchev, and Pyzhikov, Khrushchevskaia ottepel'. 77. Galina Ivanova, for example, quotes an ex-zek who wrote to a fellow purge victim, "The truth is, I don't know why you need complete rehabilitation, unless it's for an administrative career. This false restoration of honor cannot satisfy the injured feelings of a citizen. (After all, you're not the one who needs to be rehabilitated, but our unsullied government):' G. M. Ivanova, GULAG v sisteme tolitarnogo gosudarstva (Moscow: Moskovskii obshchestvennyi nauchnyi fond, 1997), 80-81. 78. "Iz spravki o rabote Komiteta partiinogo kontrolia pri TsK KPSS za period s 1 marta 1956 g. po 1 marta 1957 goda;' in Reabilitatsiia: Kak eto bylo; Fevral' 1956-nachalo 80-kh godov, ed. A. Artizov et al. (Moscow: Demokratiia, 2003), 3:252-68, at 255. 79. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. 177, ll. 64-65. 80. Memorial Society: Archive of the History of Political Repressions in the USSR (hereafter Memorial) f. 2, o. 1, d. 66, l. 256. 81. N. A. Ioffe, Vremia nazad: Moia zhizn', moia sud'ba, moia epokha (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo T.O.O. "Biologicheskie nauki;' 1992), 231. 82. Memorial f. 2, o. 1, d. 104, l. 45. 83. Ibid., d. 2, l. 2. 84. Ibid., d. 100, ll. 191-92. 85. Ibid., d. 2, ll. 47, 34. 86. Ibid., d. 2, l. 55. 87. Ibid., d. 99, l. 46 ob. 88. RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 891, l. 18. 89. Memorial f. 2, o. 1, d. 64, l. 243. 90. Ibid., d. 95, l. 30. 91. Evgeniia Ginzburg, Krutoi marshrut: Khronika vremeni kul'ta lichnosti (Riga: Izdatel'stvo TsK KP Latvii, 1989), 2:302. 92. Ibid. 93. For more on the attitudes of Gulag returnees, see Nand Adler, Keeping Faith with the Party: Communist Believers Return from the Gulag (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), and Stephen F. Cohen, The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag after Stalin (Exeter, NH: Publishing Works, 2010).

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94. See Adler, Gulag Survivor, 206-16. 95. Smith, "Living Links to Lenin:' 96. See, for example, Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Women (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 306-11, esp. 310. 97. For a report on this issue, see RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 1125, l. 16. 98. "Iz spravki o rabote Komiteta partiinogo kontrolia pri TsK KPSS za period s 1 marta 1956 g. po 1 marta 1957 goda," in Artizov et al., Reabilitatsiia (1956-SOs), 255. 99. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 1125, l. 16. 100. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 1165, l. 10. 101. RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 677,11. 21-22. 102. TTsDNif. 147, o. 6, d. 467,11. 171-72. 103. TTsDNI f. 147, o. 6, d. 467, l. 127. 104. RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 941,11. 21,41-42. 105. TTsDNI f. 147, o. 6, d. 96, l. 14. 106. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. 453. 107. RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 441,11. 15-16. 108. See, for example, "Ukaz Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR ob amnistii sovetskikh grazhdan, sotrudnichavshikh s okkupantami v period velikoi otechestvennoi voiny 1941-1945gg.;' in Reabilitatsiia: Kak eto bylo; Mart 1953-fevral' 1956 (Moscow: Demokratiia, 2000), 259-60; "Postanovlenie Prezidiuma TsK KPSS '0 snyatii s ucheta nekotorykh kategorii spetsposelentsev;" in Artizov, Reabilitatsiia (1953-1956), 286-87; and "Postanovlenie prezidiuma TsK KPSS o primenenii amnistii k byvshim voennosluzhashchim sovetskoi armii i flota, osuzhdennym za sdachu v plen protivniku;' 18 September 1956, in Artizov et al., Reabilitatsiia (1956-SOs), 184-85. 109. RGANI £ 6, o. 6, d. 1165, l. 12. 110. Statistics for 1958 are not part of this total, which was compiled from the data in table 14. 111. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 1165, l. 13. 112. Ibid., ll. 13-14. 113. Miriam Dobson, "POWs and Purge Victims: Attitudes towards Party Rehabilitation, 1956-57;' Slavonic and East European Review 86, no. 2 (April2008): 328-45, comes to similar conclusions about the disparity between the rehabilitation of purge victims and POWs. 114. RGANif. 6, o. 6, d. 1172, l. 1. 115. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. 741, 11. 3, 30, 10. 116. RGANI £ 6, o. 4, d. 943,11. 11-12. 117. See, for example, TTsDNI f. 147, o. 6, d. 285, l. 139; TTsDNI f. 149, o. 6, d. 467, l. 152; TTsDNI f. 147, o. 6, d. 626,11. 5-6; TTsDNI £ 147, o. 6, d. 468,11. 58-59; and RGANI f. 6, 0. 4, d. 1972, l. 9. 118. TTsDNI f. 147, o. 6, d. 469,11. 119-20. 119. Ibid., d. 757,11. 106-7. 120. RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 2496, l. 4. 121. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 1085, l. 1. 122. Ibid., d. 1702,11. 61-63. 123. Ibid., d. 1102, l. 2-3. 124. Ibid., d. 1114,11. 2-3. 125. Ibid., d. 1146, l. 17. 126. See, for example, Josephine Wo11, Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 118-21, for a discussion of Clear Skies (Chistoe nebo).

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127. RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 430, I. 26. 128. RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 932, ll. 19-20, 39. 129. RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 2615, II. 6-8. 130. RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 388, l. 20. 131. See, for example, TTsDNI f. 147, o. 6, d. 95, I. 44. 132. See, for example, Amy Knight, Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 176-200; and A. N. Iakovlev et al., eds., Lavrentii Beriia, 1953: Stenogramma iul'skogo plenuma i drugie dokumenty (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond "Demokratiia;' 1999). 133. Dobson, Khrushchev's Cold Summer, 24-26. 134. For more on Beria's downfall, see Taubman, Khrushchev, 242-57; Dobson, Khrushchev's Cold Summer, 33-37; Knight, Beria, ch. 9; and Iakovlev et al., Lavrentii Beriia. 135. See Fedor, Russia, ch. 2. 136. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 1165, I. 10-12. 137. Ibid., I. 9. 138. See, for example, ibid., esp.ll. 2-7. 139. For Bagirov's expulsion, see "Otchet o rabote komiteta partiinogo kontrolia pri TsK KPSS za periods oktiabria 1952 g. po 1 ianvaria 1956 g.;' in Iakovlev, Reabilitatsiia: Politicheskie protsessy 30-50-x godov (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1991), 68-74. For Yakuvov and Kuliev, see RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 667, ll. 5-7 and 8-10. 140. RGANif. 6, o. 6, d. 1165,11. 10 and 40. 141. "Spravki o rabote Komiteta partiinogo kontrolia pri TsK KPSS za periods 1 marta 1956 g. po 1 marta 1957 g.;' in Iakovlev, Reabilitatsiia, 74-80, at 76-79. 142. Ol'ga Shatunovskaia, Ob ushedshem veke: Rasskazyvaet Olga Shatunovskaia, comp. ]ana Kut'ina eta!. (La Jolla, CA: DAA Books, 2000), 291. 143. Kathleen E. Smith, Remembering Stalin's Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 167. 144. RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 1600, ll. 22-23. 145. Ibid., d. 16, I. 58. 146. RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 942, I. 47. 147. Ibid., ll. 18. 148. RGANif. 6, o. 4, d. 148,11. 1-22. 149. Sergei Khrushchev, ed., Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 1, trans. George Shriver (University Park: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 118. 150. RGANI f. 6, o. 4, f. 750, ll. 7-8. 151. Ibid., d. 582, ll. 5-7.

Notes to Chapter Four 1. See Cynthia Hooper, "Terror from Within;' especially chapter 2, for more on "popular control" and the party's watchdog role, both in corruption cases and beyond. 2. Most of the articles concerning "corruption" (korruptsiia) in the Pravda digital archive [http://dlib.eastview.com/browse/publication/9305] deal with foreign news; see, for example, "Organizovannaia prestupnost' i politicheskaia korruptsiia v SShA;' Pravda, 7 October 1951. 3. The Russian terms mentioned above are sometimes even more challenging to define than their English equivalents. Rastrata, translated "waste" above, has connotations both of improvidence and of corruption; it might also be translated as "embezzlement" or

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"squandering;' and one contemporary Russian dictionary defined it as "the illegal expenditure of entrusted funds or property with a mercenary goal" (Ushakov, Tolkovyi slovar', 3:1278). Prisvoenie, likewise, might be translated as either "embezzlement" or "misappropriation:' 4. Ledeneva, Russia's Economy of Favours, 42-47; Joseph Berliner, Factory and Manager in the USSR (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 184-90; Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917-1953 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 263-65; Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 62-65. 5. See, for example, Heinzen, "The Art of the Bribe;' 389-412, for a discussion of the sometimes murky line between blat and bribery. 6. Ledeneva, Russia's Economy of Favors, 46. 7. Granick, The Red Executive, 43. 8. As Nicholas Lampert writes, "Anybody with authority in any recognised organisation in the Soviet Union is a 'servant of the state; even if the organisation (say a trade union) is not officially regarded as a 'state organisation:" Nicholas Lampert, "Law and Order in the USSR: The Case of Economic and Official Crime;' Soviet Studies 36, no. 3 (July 1984): 369. 9. See, for example, Carl Friedrich's definition of corruption as "deviant behavior associated with a particular motivation, namely that of private gain at public expense:' Carl J. Friedrich, "Corruption Concepts in Historical Perspective;' in Political Corruption: Concepts & Contexts, ed. Arnold J. Heidenheimer and Michael Johnston (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 15-23, at 15. Joseph Nye, by the same token, defines corruption as "behavior which deviates from the formal duties of a public role because of private-regarding (personal, close family, private clique) pecuniary or status gains; or violates rules against the exercise of private-regarding influence:' JosephS. Nye, "Corruption and Political Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis;' in Heidenheimer and Johnston, Political Corruption, 281-300, at 284. 10. See, for example, Vadim Volkov, "Patrimonialism versus Rational Bureaucracy: On the Historical Relativity of Corruption;' in Bribery and Blat in Russia: Negotiating Reciprocity from the Middle Ages to the 1990s, ed. Stephen Lovell, Alena Ledeneva, and Andrei Rogachevskii (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), 35-47. 11. See Peter Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 29-31, for more on the distinction between administrative, economic, and property crimes. The line between these categories could be imprecise: the theft of state property was considered an administrative crime until the 1947 theft decrees, for instance, and was then deemed a property crime. Speculation is an example of an "economic crime" (not an administrative crime), although some officials stole state property (an administrative crime) to sell at speculative prices (an economic offense). 12. As James Heinzen notes ("Corruption among Officials;' 176), the theft decrees were often used against officials guilty of embezzlement, but many of the decrees' targets were guilty of acts of petty theft that do not fall under most definitions of "corruption:' Nevertheless, Communists accused of theft were more likely than non-Communists to be guilty of corruption, and not merely of taking grain or private property for their own use. 13. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 25, I. 1. 14. RGANI f. 77, o. I, d. 9, ll. 20, 69; d. 10, ll. 5, 65, 131; d. 11, ll. 5, 63, 124; d. 12, ll. 5, 54, 158, 217; see table 17 for a more detailed breakdown of these statistics. 15. See, for example, the works of Heinzen, Hooper, and other scholars cited in the introduction, note 36.

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16. RGASPI f. 17, o. 7, d. 309, 1. 138. 17. Ibid., d. 429, 1. 8. 18. Ibid., d 546, 1. 1. 19. RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 2, 1. 41. 20. Ibid., 11. 107-8. 21. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 25, 1. 1. 22. Ibid., 1. 3. 23. Ibid., 1. 1. 24. Although this categorization at first seems arbitrary and random, it was based on the idea that crimes like bigamy and drunkenness were most important not as moral infractions, but as evidence of political corruption-a notion that lost currency in the 1950s but remained strong under Stalin. Until after the war, the party rarely expelled rank-andfile members for degeneracy unless their drunkenness threatened their role in economic production; instead, most "degenerate" Communists were officials and economic administrators who spent their time drinking, carousing, and enriching themselves when they should have been doing their jobs. 25. Between 1947 and 1951, expulsions for "theft, waste, and the abuse of a service position'' outnumbered expulsions for moral degeneracy in Kalinin Province by a margin of seventy-eight to twenty-two, for example. (See TTsDNI f. 147, o. 4, d. 698, 11. 24, 55; d. 1346, 11. 25, 66; d. 1786,11. 31, 64; d. 2210, 11. 28, 69, 78; o. 5, d. 5, 1. 67.) During the same period, appeals to the KPK of expulsions for the abuse of a service position outnumbered appeals in cases involving drunkenness and family misconduct by a margin of seven to three. (See RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 17, 1. 1; d. 18, 1. 1; d. 19, 1. 1; d. 20, 1. 1; and d. 21, 1. 1.) 26. TTsDNI f. 147, o. 5, d. 830, 1. 86; d. 1062,11.24, 27, 29. By contrast, expulsions for drunkenness and family misconduct dropped from 118 to 79-a 34 percent drop. 27. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 203, d. 1056. 28. See GOPAPO f. 105, o. 11, d. 90, 1. 47; GOPAPO f. 105, o. 196, d. 279, 1. 17; d. 254, 1. 2. 29. The campaign against accounting fraud is discussed in Mark Harrison, "Forging Success: Soviet Managers and Accounting Fraud, 1943 to 1962;' Journal of Comparative Economics 39, no. 1 (2011), 43-64. The scholarship on the other campaigns appears in the footnotes that follow. 30. The text of the decree, entitled "0 merakh po likvidatsii narushenii Ustava sel'skokhoziaistvennoi arteli v kolkhozakh;' was printed in many publications, including Bolshevik, nos. 17-18 (September 1946): 66-70. See Jean Levesque, "'Part-Time Peasants': Labour Discipline, Collective Farm Life, and the Fate of Soviet Socialized Agriculture after the Second World War, 1945-1953" (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2003), 52-70, for an account of the decree that focuses on the crackdown on squandering and the expansion of private plots by kolkhozniki. 31. Levesque, '"Part-Time Peasants;" 54, 59. 32. "0 merakh po likvidatsii narushenii Ustava;' 67-68. 33. For the text of the laws, see "Ob ugolovnoi otvetstvennosti za khishchenie gosudarstvennogo i obshchestvennogo imushchestva;' "Ukaz Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR ot 4 iiunia 1947g.;' and "Ob usilenii okhrany lichnoi sobstvennosti grazhdan;' "Ukaz Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR ot 4 iiunia 1947g.;' in Sbornik dokumentov po istorii ugolovnogo zakonodatel'stva SSSR i RSFSR, 1917-1952 gg., ed. I. T. Goliakov (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo iuridicheskoi literatury, 1953), 430-31. 34. See P. Charles Hachten, "Property Relations and the Economic Organization of Soviet Russia, 1941-1948" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2005), 369, on changes in

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sentencing under the decree. For more on the June 4 decrees, see Peter Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice, 405,413, 427-39; Filtzer, Soviet Workers, 253-54; Hachten, "Property Relations;' 369-407, esp. 369-71 and 400-407. 35. Heinzen, "Corruption among Officials;' 177. 36. For statistics on expulsion in 1946 and 1947, see RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 5, II. 73, 166. 37. He had not; he was also unaware of the farm's failure to fulfill the potato plan. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 196, d. 192, I. 2. He had been sentenced to five years in jail the week before. 38. TTsDNI f. 147, o. 4, d. 551, II. 195, 172. 39. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 782, I. 4. 40. See, for example, RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 12, I. 128. 41. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 203, d. 1170, II. 8-10. 42. Ibid., d. 1144. 43. TTSDNI f. 147, o. 4, d. 1522, I. 124 and f. 147; d. 1111, II. S-6. 44. Examples include an accountant for the oblast procuracy in Kalinin, expelled for the "waste" of 11,177 rubles in 1947 (TTsDNI f. 147, o. 4, d. 551, I. 158); the accountant of a peat enterprise, expelled the same day for taking 9,125 rubles (TTsDNI f. 147, o. 4, d. 551, I. 161); a rural consumer union accountant who, together with a storekeeper, stole 30,308 rubles (TTsDNI f. 147, o. 4, d. 1112, I. 150); and many more. 45. Peter Solomon, for example, notes the ambiguity of these offenses in Soviet Criminal Justice, 442. 46. For more on this theme, see Yoram Gorlizki, "Party Revivalism;' and James Heinzen, "Corruption among Officials:' 47. See Heinzen, "The Art of the Bribe;' and Jeffrey W. Jones, Everyday Life and

the "Reconstruction" of Soviet Russi({ during and after the Great Patriotic War, 1943-1948 (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2008), ch. 8. 48. For the text of Minin's letter, see GARF f. 9492, o. 2, d. 44, II. 227-28; for Heinzen's analysis, see Heinzen, "A 'Campaign Spasm:" 49. Heinzen, "A 'Campaign Spasm;" 137. 50. See, for example, RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 94, I. 165, for a housing official in Baku who took a bribe to allow two citizens to exchange apartments; RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1704, I. 65, for an agronomist who took bribes from two kolkhoz workers who didn't want him to tell the administration about their poor work; and RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1398, I, 128, for the wife of an auto inspector who helped her husband collect bribes. 51. TTsDNI f. 147, o. 4, d. 1113, I. 118, describes the case of a man who gave a seven-thousand-ruble bribe for a false financial document. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1888, I. 140, describes the case of an accountant at a grain distribution point accused both of stealing state grain and of trying to bribe a procurator to drop the charges against her. RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 585, II. 21-22, describes a factory director who bribed a people's judge. 52. TTsDNI f. 147, o. 4, d. 551, I. 180. 53. RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 577, I. 117. 54. See, for example, RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 580, I. 30; GOPAPO f. 105, o. 203, d. 861, I. 10; d. 161, I. 10. 55. Heinzen, "The Art of the Bribe;' 397; and Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice, 381. 56. Statistics on appeals to the KPK list the number of cases involving speculation in 1949, 1950, and 1951; they totaled 226 out of31,805. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 19, I. 1; d. 1; d. 20, I. 1; and d. 21, I. 1. 57. See TTsDNI f. 147, o. 4, d. 551, I. 120, for the case of a supposed kolkhoz member who refused to work on the farm and "systematically drank and engaged in

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speculation''; see RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1799, l. 37, for the case of an unemployed Voronezh man expelled when his party card was found in a police raid on speculators. 58. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1244, l. 54. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1260, ll. 14-15 describes another railroad worker's habit of buying up foodstuffs on business trips, and then selling those goods at later train stops. 59. TTsDNI f. 147, o. 4, d. 1111, l. 43, describes an MVD officer who confiscated people's felt boots and sold them on the market. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1567, ll. 89-90, describes an MGB official whose wife sold goods for him. 60. See RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1651, l. 85; ibid., d. 1112, l. 81; and ibid., d. 1142, l. 70. 61. "Ustav Kommunisticheskoi partii sovetskoi soiuza;' Pravda, 14 October 1952, 1. 62. TTsDNI f. 147, o. 4, d. 549, l. 30. 63. For more on the currency reform, see Elena Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reforrny, 1945-1964 (Moscow: Rossiia molodaia, 1993), 41-64 (or Russia after the War, 51-55), and Hachten, "Property Relations;' ch. 8, esp. 456-76. 64. A KPK report notes that "the initiators of the violation of the law on the monetary reform in a majority of cases were secretaries of gorkorns and raikorns of the party, chairmen of city and district executive committees, and MGB and MVD workers, who found out about the procedure of the exchange of money earlier than other people:' RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 308, l. 180. 65. RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 340, l. 87. 66. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1548, ll. 75-76. 67. See, for example, RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1392, l. 140. 68. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 15, d. 399a, ll. 25, 68. 69. RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 308, l. 180. 70. TsDAHOU f. 1, o. 24, d. 5645, ll. 2 and 5. 71. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 19, I. 1; d. 20, I. 1. 72. For a representative example, involving a consumer union head who allowed customers to trade in their savings at a favorable rate but did not benefit personally, see RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 252, l. 41. 73. S. N. Bratus' et a!., eds., Sovetskii iuridicheskii slovar' (Moscow: Gosiurizdat, 1953). 74. This change reflected the Khrushchev-era regime's interest in protecting not just the state, but all of"society" (obshchestvo). See L. P. Kurakov, Ekonornika i pravo: Slovar'-spravochnik (Moscow: Vuz i shkola, 2004). 75. GARF f. 8131, o. 37, d. 2817, l. 21. 76. TsDAHOU f. 1, o. 23, d. 5656, l. 4. 77. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 6, I. 8. 78. Ibid., d. 6, ll. 11-12. 79. Ibid., d. 796, I. 25. 80. Ibid., d. 6, I. 18. 81. For the 1949 case of a factory bureau member accused of stealing a pig from a Pioneer camp, see GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 2, d. 136, I. 204; for the case of a kolkhoz chairman accused of pilfering vegetables, see GOPAPO f. 105, o. 196, d. 878. Both cases began with anonymous denunciations, but neither was typical of administrative misconduct cases overall. 82. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 782, I. 3. 83. RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 200, ll. 39-40. 84. Ibid., d. 190, l. 122. 85. For further KPK reports on this issue, see RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 819; and RGASPI f. 17, 0. 122, d. 98.

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86. See Hooper, "Terror from Within;' ch. 2, on popular control. 87. GARF f. 8131, o. 37, d. 2818, l. 2. 88. Ibid., II. 21-22. 89. For more on this issue, see Edward Cohn, "Policing the Party: Conflicts between Local Prosecutors and Party Organs under Late Stalinism," Europe-Asia Studies 65, no. 10 (December 2013): 1912-30. 90. GARF f. 8131, o. 29, d. 11. 91. See GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 2236, for reports from Latvia, Astrakhan, Irkutsk, and Belarus. 92. GARF f. 8131, o. 27, d. 4668, L 126. (Thanks to Yoram Gorlizki for sharing his notes on this file.) 93. Gorlizki, "Political Reform:' 94. See, for example, RGANI f. 6, o. 1, d. 12, L 12. 95. "Ustav Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza;' Pravda, 14 October 1952, 1. 96. GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 2236, ll. 26-27. 97. RGANI f. 5, o. 15, d. 411, II. 27-31. 98. GARF f. 8131, o. 29, d. 11, L 218. (For the full report, see II. 123-219.) 99. Ibid., II. 43-44. 100. RGANI £ 6, o. 6, d. 837, l. 8. 101. Ibid., d. 811, L 10. 102. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 811, L 13. 103. Ibid., ll. 17,20-24. 104. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1308, II. 2-3. 105. RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 9, ll. 20, 69; d. 10, ll. 5, 65, 131; d. 11, II. 5, 63, 124; d. 12, ll. 5, 54, 158, 217. 106. R. A. Rudenko, Izvestiia, 7 May 1961,3. 107. See Gleb Tsipursky, '"As a Citizen, I Cannot Ignore These Facts': Whistleblowing in the Khrushchev Era;' Jahrbiicher fiir Geschichte Osteuropas 58, no. 1 (March 2010): 52-69. 108. "Doklad tovarishcha N. S. Khrushchev;' Pravda, 20 November 1962, 7. 109. "Byt' pravdivym pered partiei i narodom;' Pravda, 7 April1961, 1. llO. See Dobson, Khrushchev's Cold Summer, ch. 6, for more on the regime's shift from "redemption" to "excision'' in criminal policy. lll. See RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 9, ll. 20, 69; d. 10, ll. 5, 65. 112. Heinzen, "Corruption among Officials;' 179. 113. Ibid., 178-80. 114. See Harold J. Berman, Justice in the US.S.R.: An Interpretation of Soviet Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 8488; and Heinzen, "Corruption among Officials;' 181-82. 115. RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 12, ll. 158,217. 116. TsDNISO f. 1300, o. 8, d. 170, ll. 54-55. Comrade E was apparently never prosecuted. ll7. RGANI £ 6, o. 5, d. 376, ll. 49-62. 118. See Gorlizki, "Political Reform;' for more on this campaign. 119. R. A. Rudenko, "Strogo bliusi sotsialisticheskuiu zakonnost:" Partiinaia zhizn' (1954): 6, 16. 120. Materialy XXII s'ezda, 434. 121. Gorlizki, "Political Reform;' 258-59.

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Notes to Chapter Five 1. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. 771, ll. 1-62. 2. Ibid., ll. 2-4. 3. See, for example, Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Signals from Below: Soviet Letters of Denunciation of the 1930s;' in Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789-1989 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 85-120, esp. 103-7; and Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Wives' Tales;' in Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 240-61. 4. For an overview of the party's attitude toward family life at this time, see Cynthia Hooper, "Terror oflntimacy: Family Politics in the 1930s Soviet Union;' in Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside, ed. Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 61-91; Robert Thurston, "The Soviet Family during the Great Terror, 1935-1941;' Soviet Studies 43, no. 3 (1991): 553-74; and Golfo Alexopoulos, "Stalin and the Politics of Kinship: Practices of Collective Punishments, 1920s-1940s;' Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 1 (January 2008): 91-117. 5. See, for example, Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual; Field, Private Life; and Brian LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev's Russia; LaPierre, "Making Hooliganism on a Mass Scale: The Campaign against Petty Hooliganism in the Soviet Union, 19561964;' Cahiers du monde russe 47, nos. 1-2 (January-June 2006): 349-76; and "Private Matters or Public Crimes: The Emergence of Domestic Hooliganism in the Soviet Union, 1939-1966;' in Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres of Soviet Russia, ed. Lewis Siegelbaum (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 191-207. For articles that touch on the public-private relationship under Khrushchev as expressed in the fields of housing and design, see Susan Reid, "Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev;' Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 211-52; and Victor Buchli, "Khrushchev, Modernism, and the Fight against 'Petit-Bourgeois' Consciousness in the Soviet Home;' The Journal of Design History 10, no. 2 (1997): 161-76. 6. Most experts treat the curtailment of personal privacy as a Khrushchev-era change, but scholars like Vladimir Shlapentokh and journalists like Maurice Hindus have pointed to the 1944 family law as a turning point in Soviet family policy. See Maurice Hindus, House without a Roof Russia after Forty- Three Years of Revolution (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1961), and Vladimir Shlapentokh, Love, Marriage, and Friendship in the Soviet Union: Ideals and Practices (New York: Praeger, 1984). 7. See Kharkhordin, esp. ch. 7, for more on mutual surveillance during this period, and Brian LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev's Russia, esp. ch. 4, for more on the obshchestvennost' campaign. 8. Miriam Dobson refers to the redemptive strain in discussions of byt in Khrushchev's Cold Summer, 136-40. 9. Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Wives' Tales;' looks at similar issues from the point of view of women who appealed to the party and state for help. 10. Historians who discuss the Khrushchev regime's struggle with deviancy include Juliane Furst, "The Arrival of Spring? Changes and Continuities in Soviet Youth Culture and Policy between Stalin and Khrushchev;' in Jones, Dilemmas of De-Stalinization, 135-53; Kristin Roth-Ey, "Mass Media and the Remaking of Soviet Culture, 1950s-1960s" (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2003), esp. ch. 2 ("The Problem with the 'Youth Problem': Bad Kids and Soviet Community"), 46-98; Brian LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev's Russia; Ann Livschiz, "De-Stalinizing Soviet Childhood: The Quest for Moral Rebirth, 1953-58;' in Jones, Dilemmas ofDe-Stalinization, 117-34; and Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Social

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Parasites;' 377-408. Earlier scholars touching on the same subjects include Allen Kassof, The Soviet Youth Program: Regimentation and Rebellion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), and Ludwig Liegle, The Family's Role in Soviet Education (New York: Springer, 1975). 11. Christiane Kuller looks at similar issues in a West German context, for example, in Familienpolitik im foderativen Sozialstaat: Die Formierung eines Politikfeldes in der Bundesrepublik, 1949-1975 (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2004), while Susan Pedersen looks at Britain and France in Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), to name two examples of books that touch on the efforts of Western European states to strengthen the family. 12. Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); and Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. ch. 4 ("The Personal Does Not Exist") discuss the regime's attitude toward byt and private life in more detail. 13. 0. Bogdanova, "Chastnoe li delo-byt?;' Agitator 6 (March 1959): 47-51. 14. See, for example, Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual, for a comparison between the Soviet 1920s and 1950s, and Sean Guillory, "We Shall Refashion Life on Earth! The Political Culture of the Young Communist League, 1918-1928" (PhD diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 2009), ch. 3, for a discussion of the early Komsomol's involvement in its members' family and sex lives. 15. Hindus, House without a Roof, 139. See Alexander Werth, Russia under Khrushchev (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 79, 144-65, for more on the country's changing sexual mores under Khrushchev. 16. Deborah Field makes a similar point when she argues that the Khrushchev era created "new opportunities for professionals and officials to intervene in private life, but also new ways for people to evade, resist, and make use of that interference:' Field, Private Life, 5. 17. D. Beliaev, "K voprosu o 'chastnoi' zhizni;' Pravda, 4 July 1947, 3. 18. For one example from after the war, see A. S. Aleksandrov, 0 moral'nom oblike sovetskogo cheloveka (Moscow, 1948), 99-110. 19. See Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and David L. Hoffmann, "Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in Its Pan-European Context;' Journal of Social History 34, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 35-54, for more on the Soviet pronatalist turn of the 1930s. 20. As Sheila Fitzpatrick has pointed out, party discipline cases involving child support were rare in the 1930s. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Signals from Below," 105-6; and ibid., Everyday Stalinism, 144-47. Fitzpatrick also argues that the number of women's denunciations of their husbands grew under postwar Stalinism. 21. Iaroslavskii, Chego partiia trebuet, 78-81. (Italics in the original.) 22. See Cynthia V. Hooper, "Terror oflntimacy: Family Politics in the 1930s Soviet Union;' in Kiaer and Naiman, Everyday Life, 61-91, for more on this theme. 23. RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 129, ll. 5ff. 24. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 3, d. 32, I. 29. 25. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 3, d. 19, ll. 49-50. 26. TTsDNI f. 123, o. 1, d. 370, I. 22. 27. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1746, I. 96.

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28. Mie Nakachi, "N. S. Khrushchev and the 1944 Soviet Family Law: Politics, Reproduction, and Language;' Eastern European Politics and Societies 20, no. 1 (2006): 40-68; and "Replacing the Dead;' in particular chs. 2 and 4. Other works touching on the law include Peter Juviler, "Family Reforms on the Road to Communism;' in Soviet Policy-Making: Studies of Communism in Transition, ed. Peter H. Juviler and Henry W. Morton (New York: Frederick Praeger, 1967), 29-60; Fitzpatrick, "Wives' Tales;' 255-59; and a contemporary guide to the law, G. M Sverdlov, Sovetskoe zakonodatel'stvo o brake i seme (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo akademii nauk, 1949). 29. Nakachi, "N.S. Khrushchev:' 53-55. 30. Fitzpatrick, "Wives' Tales;' 256. 31. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1439,11.45-46. 32. See RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1830, 1. 75, for an example. 33. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1577,1. 47. 34. See, for example, Fitzpatrick, "Wives' Tales;' and Shlapentokh, Love, Marriage, and Friendship, 27. 35. GARF f. R-5704, o. 1, d. 75, 11. 8-10. 36. Ibid., 11. 11-14. 37. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 203, d. 492, 1. 6. 38. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 3, d. 32, 1. 30. 39. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 3, d. 32, 1. 178. 40. Nakachi, "N. S. Khrushchev;' 54. 41. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 2, d. 136,11. 211-13. 42. Shlapentokh, Love, Marriage, and Friendship, 27-28. 43. See RGANI £ 6, o. 6, dd. 6, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 1012, 1017, 1020, 1081, 1085, 1167, 1171, and 1174,1. 1, for statistics on appeals to the KPK from 1945-1961; the figure varied from 7 percent to 11 percent in the years following 1951. 44. For a discussion of sexuality among youth in the late Stalin years, see Juliane Furst, Stalin's Last Generation, ch. 7. 45. See Mark Field, "Alcoholism, Crime, and Delinquency in Soviet Society;' Social Problems 3, no. 2 (October 1955): 100-109, for an overview of Soviet press coverage. Ann Livschiz, "De-Stalinizing Soviet Childhood;' and Boris M. Segal, The Drunken Society: Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in the Soviet Union (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1990), 375-76, touch on the ways that the death of Stalin led to greater public discussion of children's issues and alcoholism, respectively. See Deborah Field, Private Life, for a detailed discussion of Khrushchev-era Communist morality. 46. Field, Private Life, 14. 47. 0. Kuprin, Byt-ne chastnoe delo (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1959); and Markov, Byt. 48. I. Perlov, "Rodimye piatna" proshlogo (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1958), 37, 29, 34, 36. 49. See Juliane Furst, Stalin's Last Generation, ch. 5, on the rise of youth crime after the war, and Brian LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev's Russia, for a discussion of hooliganism. 50. "Pis'mo TsK KPSS partiinym organizatsiiam '0 sereznykh nedostatkakh v vospitanii detei;' in Prezidium TsK KPSS, 1954-1964: Chernovye protokol'nye zapisi zasedanii, stenogrammy, postanovleniia, ed. A. A. Fursenko (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006), 2:114-22, at 119. 51. Ibid., 2:116. 52. Ibid., 2:116-17.

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Notes to Chapter Five

53. Ibid., 2:120. 54. N. Bogdanov, "Obshchenarodnoe, partiinoe delo;' Sem'ia i shkola, no. 12 (December 1962): 1-3, at 2. 55. "Dostoin li ia doveriia?;' Partiinaia zhizn', no. 12 (June 1964): 44-45. 56. Materialy XXII s''ezda, 195. 57. P. Filonovich, 0 kommunisticheskoi morali: Populiarnyi ocherk (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1963), 234. 58. See Yoram Gorlizki, "Delegalization in Russia;' 403-25; and Darrell P. Hammer, "Law Enforcement, Social Control and the Withering of the State: Recent Soviet Experience:' Soviet Studies 14, no. 4 (April1963): 379-97, for more on comrades' courts and the

druzhina. 59. Furst, Stalin's Last Generation, 193-96. 60. See, for example, I. Fursov, "Oberegat' vysokoe zvanie chlena partii;' Partiinaia zhizn', no. 14 (July 1964): 47-52. 61. Kuprin, Byt, 59. 62. Ibid., 50. 63. Filonovich, 0 kommunisticheskoi morali, 233. 64. Markov, Byt, 56 and 45. 65. Ibid., 58. 66. S. Goncharuk, "Agitatoru do vsego est' delo;' Agitator, no. 11 (1961): 50-51. 67. Kuprin, 0 kommunisticheskoi morali, 50-51. 68. As Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown ("Wives' Tales:' 241), party officials sometimes played an informal role in disciplining Communists under postwar Stalinism ("assuming something of the role of a priest, a psychiatrist, or an Ann Landers"), and I have found occasional references to besedy involving party officials before 1953. The number appears to rise dramatically under Khrushchev, however. 69. For one account of the role of obshchestvennost' in settling family problems that treats party interventions as just one of a range of Khrushchev-era social interventions, see Elena Zhidkova, "Praktiki razresheniia semeinykh konfliktov v 1950-1960-e gody: Obrashcheniia grazhdan v obshchestvennye organizatsii i partiinye iacheiki;' in Sovetskaia sotsial'naia politika: Stseny i deistvuiuishchie litsa, 1940-1985, ed. E. R. larskaia-Smirnova and P. V. Romanov (Moscow: 000 "Variant:' 2008), 266-89. 70. M. Kissis, "Ne prokhodite mimo narushenii obshchestvennogo poriadka;' Bloknot agitatora 17 (June 1955): 12-21, is one example of an article that discusses party discipline cases on drunkenness and public disorder in the context of other examples of obshchestvennoe mnenie, treating them largely as opportunities to humiliate Communists accused of wrongdoing. 71. Hooper, ''A Darker 'Big Deal:" 72. TTsDNI f. 32, o. 1, d. 610, l. 16. 73. Ibid., ll. 16-17. 74. Ibid., ll. 17-18. 75. Ibid., ll. 38-39. 76. See TTsDNI f. 32, o. 1, d. 580, ll. 35-38; and ibid., d. 579, ll. 48-53, for full details of the case at the PPO level. 77. TTsDNI f. 32, o. 1, d. 580, ll. 35-37. 78. Ibid., l. 36. 79. TTsDNI f. 32, o. 1, d. 38. 80. Ibid., d. 579, l. 52. The story became murkier from there: the expulsion of Comrades X and Y was endorsed by the factory party committee, the raikom, the gorkom, and

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231

the obkom, which made the expulsion official in February 1956. (See TTsDNI f. 147, o. 6, d. 15, ll. 35-36.) Comrade Y then appealed to the KPK in Moscow, which asked the obkom to look into the case in more detail; in June 1956, the obkom restored Comrade Y to the party with a reprimand. The obkom protocol gives no indication of the reason fot: her reinstatement (and files explaining the obkom's decision are still closed), and Comrade X apparently remained outside the party. (See TTsDNI f. 147, o. 6, d. 15, I. 111.) 81. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. 521, ll. 1-29. 82. See, for example, RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 18, ll. 11, 36, for a 1956 case involving a man who specifically argued that he had no children with the wife he left in 1955 and that he should therefore be treated more leniently. In a 1960 case, meanwhile, the party expelled a man for systematic drinking after his wife followed him to another apartment and found him drinking with another woman-no children were involved. (RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 2845, I. 27.) 83. TTsDNI f. 32, o. 1, d. 519, I. 42. 84. See GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 2, d. 236, ll. 77-78 for a similar case from 1949, the only Stalin-era case of a woman expelled for breaking up her husband's marriage that I have found in my research. 85. See TTsDNI f. 147, o. 6, d. 15, ll. 21, 36, and 111; and ibid., d. 95, ll. 26 and 48. One of these expulsions was overturned on appeal. 86. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 6, d. 2, ll. 41-43. 87. Ibid., ll. 66-67. 88. See, for example, M.A. Sigov, Liubov', brak i sem'ia v sovetskom obshchestve (v pomoshch lektoru, vystupaiushchemu pered molodezh'iu) (Moscow: Obshchestvo po rasprostraneniiu politicheskikh i nauchnykh znanii RSFSR, 1959), 26. 89. See GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 6, d. 2, ll. 66-68, for the cases of the two lovers. 90. RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 9, I. 40. 91. A similar but less pronounced trend from the 1930s is described in Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, 106. 92. RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 2449, ll. 22-25. 93. TTsDNI £ 32, o. 1, d. 519, ll. 58-59; and ibid.,£ 31, o. 1, d. 545, I. 127. 94. TTsDNI f. 32, o. 1, d. 545, I. 42. 95. Ibid., d. 590, I. 134. 96. See RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 712, I. 6; and ibid., d. 2678, ll. 46-47, for two cases of Communists who were accused of paying insufficient attention to their children and of leaving guns in places where their children could find them. 97. For an extremely rare case of a Communist disciplined for the political deviance of his son (who had defected while working in the embassy in Burma), see RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 2237, ll. 1-10. This is the only case I have seen in which a Communist was punished for the youthful rebelliousness or political disloyalty of his or her offspring; every other case has referred to the need to ensure that future generations were economically productive and law-abiding. 98. RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1463, I. 67, describes a man who beat his wife so severely in June 1947 that she was in the hospital for a week; he got into a drunken fight two months later, and the next month attacked a war invalid and beat his wife again. He was not expelled until1949. 99. See RGANI f. 6, o. 2, d. 1874, ll. 145-46 for a 1948 case initiated by the victim's mother, and GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 2, d. 136, ll. 179-80, for a 1949 case in which four neighbors broke down an apartment door to stop a Communist from beating his wife. 100. RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 389, I. 47. 101. TTsDNI f. 147, o. 6, d. 625, ll. 38-39.

232

Notes to Chapter Six

102. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. 601, 1. 8. 103. Ibid., 1. 24. 104. GOPAPO f.l-5, o. 259, d. 731. 105. TTsDNI f. 147, o. 6, d. 285, 1. 190. 106. RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 818, 1. 68. 107. LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev's Russia, ch. 2. 108. RGANI f. 6, o. 4, d. 654, 1. 14. 109. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. 291, 1. 13. llO. See, for example, TsDNISO f. 1300, o. 8, d. 170, 1. 156, for a beseda involving a mechanic. See GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. ll1, 1. ll, for the case of a school director from Perm' Province who was repeatedly summoned to the raikom for informal meetings to discuss his family. lll. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 6, d. 2, 1. 20. ll2. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. 1081. 113. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 25, 1. 1. ll4. There were 978 Communists in the factory in 1955, for instance. GOPAPO f. 2007, 0. 5, d. 12, 1. 27. llS. See GOPAPO f. 2007, op. 2, dd. 42-43,61,82, ll1, and 136; ibid., op. 3, dd. 2, 19, 32, 48; ibid., op. 5, dd. 2, 15, 16, 24; and ibid., op. 6, dd. 2, 8, 9, 18, 26, and 34. 116. Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual, 279 and 303. ll7. Filonovich, 0 kommunisticheskoi morali, 233. ll8. TTsDNI f. 32, o. 1, d. 579, 1. 52. ll9. G. Drogvinene, "Kommunist v sem'e;' Kommunist: Zhurnal tsentral'nogo komiteta kommunisticheskoi partii Litvy, no. 10 (October 1961): 69. 120. See, for example, Shlapentokh, Love, Marriage, and Friendship, 27 and 106. 121. V. Gerasimov, "Strannosti kharaktera;' Rabochii krai, 7 April1957, 3.

Notes to Chapter Six 1. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. ll, 1. 19. 2. Ibid., 1. 3. 3. Ibid., 1. 2. 4. Ibid., 1. 8. 5. Ibid., 1. 12. 6. For a study of the relationship between alcohol and autocracy in Russian history, see Mark Lawrence Schrad, Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). For studies of alcohol in imperial Russia, see Patricia Herlihy, The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), and David Christian, "Living Water": Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Two recent studies discuss Russian temperance and drinking in the early twentieth century: Kate Transchel, Under the Influence: Working-Class Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1895-1932 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), and Laura L. Phillips, Bolsheviks and the Bottle: Drink and Worker Culture in St. Petersburg, 1900-1929 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000). Two emigre scholars have also written sociological accounts of the place of alcohol in Soviet society-Boris M. Segal, Drunken Society, and Vladimir G. Treml, Alcohol in the USSR: A Statistical Study (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1982). Stephen White, finally, discusses Gorbachev's

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233

anti -alcohol campaign in his book Russia Goes Dry: Alcohol, State and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 7. Transchel, Under the Influence, ch. 7. 8. See, for example, Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, 31-32. See Transchel, Under the Influence, 98-101, on the link between temperance and cultural revolution. 9. See, for example, Walter Connor, Deviance in Soviet Society: Crime, Delinquency, and Alcoholism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 39-42. 10. Connor, Deviance in Soviet Society, 39-42, 49-52. 11. See Phillips, Bolsheviks and the Bottle, 98-99. 12. Transchel, Under the Influence, 111-12. A 1928 NKVD report, Transchel notes, stated that 22 percent of those purged from the party were expelled as "habitual alcoholics:' 13. RGASPif. 17, o. 7, d. 309, l. 138. 14. Transchel, Under the Influence, 112. 15. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, 76. 16. K. Kosteiko, "0 lozhnoi doblesti i bezuchastnom obkome;' Komsomo'skaia pravda, 17 July 1954, 2. 17. "0 druzhbe i vypivkakh;' Agitator, no. 22 (November 1958): 52-54. 18. See, for example, RGASPI f. 356, o. 2, d. 10, ll. 155-58. 19. RGANI f. 13, o. 1, d. 464, ll. 127-33. 20. Zhores I. Alferov, Nauka i obshchestvo (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2005), 176. 21. See Schrad, Vodka Politics, ch. 16; and White, Russia Goes Dry, 33-36, for more detail on Soviet statistics on alcohol. 22. David E. Powell, '~lcohol Abuse: The Pattern of Official Response;' in Soviet Society and the Communist Party, ed. Karl W. Ryavec (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978), 134-52, at 135. Vladimir Treml also notes that alcohol consumption rose rapidly in the postwar years. See Treml, Alcohol in the USSR, 67-82. 23. Connor, Deviance in Soviet Society, 37. 24. See LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev's Russia, 156-58, for a discussion of the lack ofleisure activities available to Soviet citizens under Khrushchev. 25. Statistics from Perm', for example, suggest that at least two-thirds of "unworthy conduct" cases dealt with alcohol: the obkom expelled 120 members for "drinking and hooliganism'' in 1959, compared to 39 for "improper behavior in everyday life:' GOPAPO £ 105, 0. 308, d. 3, l. 2. 26. Given that some of these expulsions were likely overturned on appeal, the ratio of censures to expulsions may be even higher than these statistics suggest. 27. See, for example, GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 3, d. 6, l. 61. 28. TTsDNI f. 32, o. 1, d. 207,11. 31-32. 29. Ibid., d. 240, l. 71. 30. Ibid., d. 207, l. 120. 31. Ibid., d. 177, l. 53. 32. Ibid., l. 24. 33. TTsDNI f. 32, o. 1, d. 207, l. 120. 34. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 196, d. 391, l. 1. 35. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 2, d. 42, l. 20. 36. Ibid., l. 108. 37. TTsDNI f. 32, o. 1, d. 240, l. 76. 38. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 2, d. 111,11. 336-37. 39. See, for example, GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 2, d. 42, ll. 6, 7. 40. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 2, d. 111, ll. 97-99.

234

Notes to Chapter Six

41. TTsDNI f. 32, o.1, d. 134, ll. 73-74. 42. See GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 2, d. 111, ll. 59-60,77-97,99,232-33,333, and 336-37. 43. See, for example, GOPAPO f. 105, o. 237, d. 5, I. 45. 44. These attitudes persisted. See Powell, ''Alcohol Abuse;' and Vera Efron, "The Soviet Approach to Alcoholism;' Social Problems 17, no. 4 (Spring 1960): 307-15. 45. I have only seen one case predating 1953 in which a party committee asked an accused Communist if he was an alcoholic. See GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 3, d. 19, I. 123. 46. See M. 0. Gurevich, Psikhiatriia: Uchebnik dlia meditsinskikh institutov (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel'stvo meditsinskoi literatury, 1949) for a late Stalinist medical discussion of alcoholism. See Transchel, Under the Influence, 52-53, for a discussion of medical views of alcoholism in the late empire. 47. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 1, ll. 39-40. 48. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 196, d. 47, ll. 3, 7. 49. See TTsDNI f. 32, o. 1, dd. 129, 134, 177, 207, and 240. SO. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 3, d. 6, I. 61. 51. RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 4, I. 21. 52. Ibid. 53. See Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, 31-32, on moral reform efforts within the party. 54. See, for example, Lori Rotskoff, Love on the Rocks: Men, Women, and Alcohol in Post-World War II America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 64-70. 55. Note, for example, the many references to the workplace in the 1939 party charter's discussion of the responsibilities of Communists. 56. Spravochnik sekretaria, 461. 57. See, for example, Markov, Byt, 45-62. 58. Literaturnaia gazeta, 29 July 1954, 2. For a survey of Soviet press coverage, see Mark Field, ''Alcoholism;' 100-109. Miriam Dobson also discusses the growing interest of the press in everyday life and hooliganism: Dobson, Khrushchev's Cold Summer, 136-40. 59. See Spravochnik partiinogo rabotnika, vyp. 2 (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1959), 404-8, for the 1958 decree. References to the other legislation are available at White, Russia Goes Dry, 59 and 206, which also notes that a 1956 Central Committee resolution on labor discipline made reference to alcoholism. 60. LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev's Russia, chs. 2-3. 61. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. 851, I. 6. 62. Ibid., I. 25. 63. See, for example, Efron, "The Soviet Approach;' and P. M. Roman and Patricia J. Gebert, ''Alcohol Abuse in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.: Divergence and Convergence in Policy and Ideology;' Social Psychiatry 14 (1979): 207-16. For an account of the alcohol treatments in use in the Soviet Union at the time, see I. V. Strelchuk, Klinika i lechenie narkomanii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo meditsinskoi literatury, 1956). For a fascinating discussion of the alcohol problem by a prominent Soviet psychiatrist, see I. Strel'chuk, ''Aktivnee borot'sia s alkogolizmom;' Bloknot agitatora 28 (October 1955): 9-15. 64. Segal, Drunken Society, 375-76. 65. A 1956 report noted that the percentage of patients entering psychiatric stationeries who suffered from alcoholic psychoses or chronic alcoholism rose from 5 percent in 1951 to 16 percent in 1954; a 1954 decree by the Ministry of Health revised the rules for the expert assessment of alcoholics, while a 1958 health ministry decree discussed the use of the psychiatric profession to support the 1958 Central Committee resolution mentioned above. See GARF f. a-482, o. 50, d. 1131, I. 309; GARF f. 5-8009, o. 1, d. 1196, ll. 255-80; GARF f. 8009, o. 1, d. 1350, ll. 225-34. 66. RGANI f. 5, o. 32, d. 109, ll. 46 and 60.

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235

67. See, for example, B. Rozhnov, "P'ianstvo-obshchestvennoe zlo;' Agitator (February 1958): 59-62; A. Isaenko, "Uluchshit' propagandu zdorovogo byta;' Agitator (June 1958): 54-55; A. Litmanovich, "Vliianie alkogolizma na potomstvo;' Sem'ia i shkola (1961): 8, 46; Komsomol'skaia pravda, 4 August 1958, 2; and Pravda, 6 August 1958,2. 68. TTsDNI f. 32, o. 1, d. 787, 1. 165. 69. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 5, d. 15, 1. 156. 70. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. 411, 1. 21. 71. RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 594, 1. 29. 72. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 6, d. 9, 1. 8. 73. Ibid., 11. 90-91. 74. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. 981,11. 2-3. 75. Segal, Drunken Society, 375. 76. See, for example, Joseph W. Schneider, "Deviant Drinking as Disease: Alcoholism as a Social Accomplishment;' Social Problems 25, no. 4 (April1978): 361-72. 77. Kuprin, Byt, 56-57. 78. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 6, d. 2, 11. 27-29. 79. Ibid., d. 26, 1. 190. 80. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 2, d. 136,11. 74-75. 81. For a discussion of efforts by the Komsomol to develop new leisure activities for youth, see Gleb Tsipursky, Having Fun in the Thaw: Youth Initiative Clubs in the Post-Stalin Years, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 2201 (Pittsburgh, PA: Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 2012). For a reference to a 1930 Soviet poster that emphasized alcohol's impact on the family (but which appears to have been atypical of party rhetoric in the late Stalin years), see White, Russia Goes Dry, 30. 82. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 5, d. 2, 1. 215. 83. Ibid., d. 25, 11. 77-78. 84. GOPAPO f2007, o. 6, d. 18, 1. 271; TsDNISO f. 1300, o. 8, d. 170, 1. 156; GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 6, d. 26, 1. 46; GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 5, d. 15, 11. 116-17. 85. GOPAPO £ 2007, o. 5, d. 15, 1. 156. Although the sample size is small, it appears that female Communists were likely to be stigmatized by their peers when they engaged in drunken behavior, due to the fact that heavy drinking was seen as a male behavior and women were expected to exert a restraining influence. 86. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 6, d. 18, 1. 237. 87. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 5, d. 15, 1. 240 88. GOPAPO £ 2007, o. 6, d. 9, 1. 87. 89. Ibid., 1. 88. 90. For more on the campaign to rally obshchestvennost', see LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev's Russia, ch. 4. 91. GOPAPO £ 2007, o. 5, d. 2, 11. 107-8. 92. TsDNISO f. 1300, o. 8, d. 170,11. 144-46. 93. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 6, d. 34, 1. 34. 94. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 3, d. 48, 1. 108; TsDNISO f. 1300, o. 8, d. 171, 1. 145; GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 6, d. 8, 1. 47; and ibid., o. 5, d. 15, 1. 39. 95. LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev's Russia, ch. 1, esp. 57-58. 96. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 5, d. 16, 1. 2. 97. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. 981, 1. 3. 98. TsDNISO f. 1300, o. 8, d. 171, 1. 277. 99. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 6, d. 18, 1. 8. 100. GOPAPO f. 105, o. 259, d. 1061,1. 9. 101. GOPAPO f. 2007, o. 5, d. 15, 1. 163.

236

Notes to Conclusion

102. Ibid., I. 164. (Punctuation modified.) 103. Ibid., I. 165. 104. For a few examples, see A. Romanov, "V bor'be za novogo cheloveka;' Partiinaia zhizn', no. 22 (November 1962): 55-57; and ibid., "0 moral'nom oblike kommunista;' Partiinaia zhizn', no. 15 (August 1959): 24-28. 105. For more on the Khrushchev-era campaign against parasitism, see Fitzpatrick, "Social Parasites:' 106. RGANI f. 5, o. 32, d. 109, 11. 45-46. 107. Ibid., d. 110, I. 39. 108. Ibid., d. 110, I. 59. 109. Ibid., d. 109, 11. 46 and 60. 110. Ibid., d. 110,11. 46 and 59. 111. Ibid., d. 108, I. 21. 112. RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 10, 11. 65, 131. 113. See, for example, "0 kritike na otkrytykh partiinykh sobraniiakh;' Partiinaia zhizn', no. 1 (January 1958): 63-64; "Kakov poriadok provedeniia otkrytykh partiinykh sobranii?;' Partiinaia zhizn', no. 8 (July 1954): 65-67; "Ob otkrytakh partiinykh sobraniiakh;' Partiinaia zhizn', no. 7 (April1957): 60-64. 114. TTsDNI f. 147, o. 6, d. 750,11. 162-64. 115. Ibid., I. 163. 116. Ibid., I. 162. 117. Ibid., I. 163. 118. Ibid., 11. 163-64. 119. TsDNISO f. 1300, o. 8, d. 170, I. 146. 120. TTsDNI f. 32, o. 1, d. 545, I. 117. 121. Ibid., I. 111. 122. Ibid., I. 112. 123. Ibid. 124. TTsDNI £ 32, o. 1, d. 545, I. 117. 125. See ibid., I. 118, 199, 125, and 126. 126. TTsDNI f. 32, o. 1, d. 627, 11. 42-43.

Notes to Conclusion 1. RGASPI f .17, o. 7, d. 309, I. 138. 2. The 3 percent expulsion rate came in 1949. (See Table 4.) 3. M. Kissis, "Ne prokhodite mimo narushenii obshchestvennogo poriadka;' Bloknot agitatora, no. 17 (June 1955), 12-21, at 18. 4. Bugaev and Leibzon, Besedy ob ustave KPSS, 37-38. 5. Ibid., 43-58; see also Bugaev, Nasha leninskaia partiia, 118-28. 6. See footnote 33 in the introduction for a list of these pamphlets. 7. See, for example, Darrell P. Hammer, "The Dilemma of Party Growth," Problems of Communism 20, no. 4 (July-August 1970): 16-21; and Hough and Fainsod, How the Soviet Union is Governed, 338-40. 8. RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 13, I. 90. 9. Ibid., I. 102. 10. Ibid., I. 171.

Bibliography

Archives Derzhavnyi arkhiv Kyivs'koi oblasti (DAKO) Fond p5: Provincial Party Organization ofKyiv Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Ivanovskoi oblasti (GAIO) Fond 327: Provincial Party Committee [obkom] oflvanovo Province Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii (GARF) Fond 5704: Party Organs of the Soviet Military Administration of Germany (SVAG) Fond 8131: Procuracy of the USSR Fond 9210: Academy of Medical Sciences (AMN) Fond 9492: Ministry of Justice of the USSR Gosudarstvennyi obshchestvenno-politicheskii arkhiv Permskoi oblasti (GOPAPO) Fond 105: Provincial Party Committee [obkom] ofPerm/Molotov Province Fond 2007: Party Committee of the Dzerzhinskii Factory Memorial Society: Archive of the History of Political Repressions in the USSR (Memorial) Fond 2: Collection of Memoirs and Literary Works Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (RGANI) Fond 5: Central Committee of the Communist Party (TsK KPSS) Fond 6: Commission of Party Control (KPK) Fond 77: Party statistics Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI) Fond 17: Central Committee of the Communist Party (TsK KPSS) Fond 356: Personal Papers of Elena Stasova Tsentral'nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv hromads'kykh ob'iednan' Ukrainy (TsDAHOU) Fond 1: Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine Tsentr dokumentatsii noveishei istorii Saratovskoi oblasti (TsDNISO) Fond 594: Provincial Party Committee [obkom] of Saratov Province Fond 1300: Party Committee of the GPZ-3 Ball-Bearing Factory Fond 2552: Kazachkinskii District Committee [raikom] Tverskoi tsentr dokumentatsii noveishei istorii (TTsDNI) Fond 32: Party Committee of the Train-Car Construction Factory Fond 123: Zavolzhskii District Committee [raikom] Fond 147: Provincial Party Committee [obkom] ofKalinin Province Documents from the Commission of Party Control (RGANI, Fond 6) were examined either at RGANI or through the microfilm collection "Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and Soviet State" (published in Cambridge, England, by the State Archival Service of Russia and the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace in association with Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1993-1994). Some of these dela have since been moved to RGASPI, Fond 589.

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Memoirs Alferov, Zhores I. Nauka i obshchestvo. St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2005. Ginzburg, Evgeniia. Krutoi marshrut: Khronika vremeni kul'ta lichnosti. Riga: Izdatel'stvo TsK KP Latvii, 1989. Hindus, Maurice. House without a Roof Russia after Forty-Three Years of Revolution. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1961. - - . The Kremlin's Human Dilemma: Russia after Half a Century of Revolution. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1967. Ioffe, N. A. Vremia nazad: Moia zhizn', moia sud'ba, moia epokha. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo T.O.O. "Biologicheskie nauki;' 1992. Khrushchev, Sergei, ed. Memoirs ofNikita Khrushchev. Vol. 1, translated by George Shriver. University Park: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Shatunovskaia, Ol'ga. Ob ushedshem veke: Rasskazyvaet Olga Shatunovskaia, compiled by Jana Kut'ina et a!. La Jolla, CA: DAA Books, 2000. Willkie, Wendell L. One World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1943.

Legal, Ideological, Ethical, Political, Literary, and Medical Works Aleksandrov, A. 0 moral'nom oblike sovetskogo cheloveka. Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1948. Bezymenskii, A. "Partbilef' In Partbilet No. 224332: Stikhi o Lenine, 82-85. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1930. Bubnov, P. Na obshchestvennykh nachalakh. Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1961. Bugaev, E. I. Nasha leninskaia partiia. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1963. Bugaev, E. 1., and B. M. Leibzon. Besedy ob ustave KPSS. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1962. Filonovich, P. 0 kommunisticheskoi morali: Populiarnyi ocherk. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1963. Goliakov, I. T. Sbornik dokumentov po istorii ugolovnogo zakonodatel'stva SSSR i RSFSR, 1917-1952 gg. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo iuridicheskoi literatury, 1953.

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Gurevich, M. 0. Psikhiatriia: Uchebnik dlia meditsinskikh institutov. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel'stvo meditsinskoi literatury, 1949. Iaroslavskii, Emelian. Chego partiia trebuet ot kommunista. Moscow: Partizdat TsK VKP(b ), 1935. Indurskii, S. Lichnyi primer kommunista. Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1962. Istoriia Vsesoiuznoi Kommunisticheskoi partii (bol'shevikov). 1938. Reprinted with an afterword by Roy A. Medvedev. Moscow: Golos, 2004. Khanenko, B. Kakie neset obiazannosti i kakie imeet prava chien KPSS. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1963. Kuprin, 0. Byt-ne chastnoe delo. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1959. Lenin, V. I. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 5th ed., 55 vols. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1958-1965. Markov, V. Byt-ne chastnoe delo. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1964. Mironov, N. R. Ukreplenie zakonnosti i pravoporiadka v obshchenarodnom gosudarstveProgrammnaia zadacha partii. Moscow: luridicheskaia literatura, 1969. Mirskov, S. A. Kogo partiia prinimaet v svoi riadi. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1964. Moskovskii, V. Partiia vsego naroda: Besedy o KPSS. Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1962. Partiinaia rabota na obshchestvennykh nachalakh. Saransk: Mordovskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1962. Perlov, I. "Rodimye piatna" proshlogo. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1958. Printsipy tvoei zhizni (Besedy o moral'nom kodekse stroitelia kommunizma). Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1963. Shishkin, A. F. Osnovy kommunisticheskoi morali. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1955. Sigov, M.A. Liubov', brak i sem'ia v sovetskom obshchestve (v pomoshch lektoru, vystupaiushchemu pered molodezh'iu). Moscow: Obshchestvo po rasprostraneniiu politicheskikh i nauchnykh znanii RSFSR, 1959. Spravochnik sekretaria pervichnoi partiinoi organizatsii. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1960. Strel'chuk, I. V. Klinika i lechenie narkomanii. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo meditsinskoi literatury, 1956. Sutotskii, S. 10 millionov idushchikh vperedi (KPSS-partiia vsego naroda). Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1963. Sverdlov, G. M. Sovetskoe zakonodatel'stvo o brake i seme. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo akademii nauk, 1949. Svinarenko, A. Vysokoe zvanie kommunista. Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1962. Ukhov, G. Chego partiia trebuet ot kommunista. Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1962.

Official Party Records XVIII s'ezd Vsesoiuznoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii (b): 10-21 marta 1939 g., Stenograficheskii otchet. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1939. Materialy XXII s'ezda KPSS. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1962.

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