Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2020 number

The article is devoted to the so-called inspection of rural party organizations carried out in Siberia in January 1926 - March 1927. The research source base is shorthand reports of party forums, statistical digests, documents found in two central and one regional archives, as well as materials of the regional periodical press. The main goals, objectives, mechanisms and results of the campaign are identified based on these sources. The paper shows that it was carried out according to the directives of the Central Committee and the Central Control Committee of All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), but at the same time it had its own specific features. Thus, the inspection of rural party organizations took place in two stages in Siberia: from January to May 1926, and from November 1926 to March 1927. In just ten months of the campaign, 180 of the 2103 rural cells in Siberia were checked, which amounted 8.6 %. 345 of 2,250 tested members and candidates of the AUCP(b) were expelled from the party, at least 60 left it voluntarily or were recognized as mechanically dropped out. But in the Siberian party organization scales, this decline was insignificant and did not affect the dynamics of its number. The campaign’s main task wasn’t to exclude politically weak and decayed Communists from the AUCP(b), but above all to assess the overall performance of the cells and issue specific recommendations to eliminate the identified shortcomings. The author concludes that the inspection of rural party organizations in Siberia, contrasting the party purges of previous years aimed to combat the internal party opposition, had primarily the task to normalize the cells’ activity. By itself, checking 8.6 % of all rural cells in Siberia could not significantly improve the state of the Siberian party organization, but revealing the most common problems was an essential condition to form an adequate idea of the positions of the ruling party in the countryside for the regional leadership, and, consequently, a prerequisite for its further strengthening.