Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2019 number

The article considers the participation of the Komsomol (the All-Russian Leninist Young Communist League) in the elections to village councils in the territory of the Russian Soviet Federal Socialistic Republic (RSFSR) from autumn 1924 to spring 1925. The author tried to answer the following questions: the basis upon which the Young Communist League took part in the elections; how the Komsomol cells behaved during the election campaigns and what results it led to. The methodological basis of the article is the principle of historicism, according to which studying the phenomena of the past should be considered in close connection with the cultural and historical context, as well as the principle of objectivity, assuming an open-minded approach of a researcher to the subject under study. The author has chosen the problematic and chronological method of a wide range of specific historical techniques involving the division of historical material into a number of narrower problems studied in the order of their time sequence. The Komsomol members had no legal grounds to participate in the elections of the Soviets; such a right was granted them by the documents of the governing party and the Komsomol, but not by the legal acts. Ensuring the representation of as many as possible Komsomol members in the village councils was considered by the leadership of the Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks (RCP(b) as an important political task. Therefore, throughout the election campaign of 1924, the state bodies, the Communist Party and the Komsomol members themselves everywhere tried to put pressure on voters to force them to vote for Komsomol candidates. The peasants protested on a massive scale against turning the elections into a farce; the decrease in voter turnout, as well as the policy announced during the internal party struggle to “revive” the Soviets, prompted the top leadership of the RCP(b) to agree to conduct new elections in a number of provinces during the period from winter to spring 1925. Previous attempts of Communists and Komsomol members to impose their candidates upon the peasants was unequivocally condemned by the top leadership of the RCP(b), who in advance reconciled the possibility of increasing the share of non-party peasants in village councils. The refusal of administrative pressure caused a noticeable decrease in the Komsomol member’s share in village councils, thereby demonstrating the low credibility in the eyes of the peasants.