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

By Edward Cohn

Between 1945 and 1964, six to seven million members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were investigated for misconduct by local party organizations and then reprimanded, demoted from full party membership, or expelled. Party leaders viewed these investigations as a form of moral education and used humiliating public hearings to discipline wrongdoers and send all Soviet citizens a message about how Communists should behave. The High Title of a Communist is the first study of the Communist Party's internal disciplinary system in the decades following World War II.

Edward Cohn uses the practices of expulsion and censure as a window into how the postwar regime defined the ideal Communist and the ideal Soviet citizen. 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 more activist vision that encompassed all spheres of life. The postwar Soviet regime became less concerned with the ideological orthodoxy and political loyalty of party members, and more interested in how Communists treated their wives, raised their children, and handled their liquor. Soviet power, in other words, became less repressive and more intrusive. Cohn uses previously untapped archival sources and avoids a narrow focus on life in Moscow and Leningrad, combining rich local materials from several Russian provinces with materials from throughout the USSR. The High Title of a Communist paints a vivid portrait of the USSR's postwar era that will help scholars and students understand both the history of the Soviet Union's postwar elite and the changing values of the Soviet regime. In the end, it shows, the regime failed in its efforts to enforce a clear set of behavioral standards for its Communists—a failure that would threaten the party's legitimacy in the USSR's final days.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: Jun 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781609091798

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Table of Contents

Illustrations

Abbreviations and Russian-Language Terms

Acknowledgments

Note on Pseudonyms

Introduction

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

Chapter Two: The Last Purge

Chapter Three: De-Stalinizing Party Discipline

Chapter Four: Policing the Party

Chapter Five: Sex and the Married Communist

Chapter Six: We Talk a Lot, but Take Very Few Measures

Conclusion

Notes

Notes to Introduction

Notes to Chapter One

Notes to Chapter Two

Notes to Chapter Three

Notes to Chapter Four

Notes to Chapter Five

Notes to Chapter Six

Notes to Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figures

FIGURE 1: Communist Party Membership, 1938–1964

FIGURE 2: Communist Party Membership by Social Class, 1938–1962

Tables

TABLE 1: Communist Party Membership by Year, 1938–1964

TABLE 2: The Class Breakdown of Communists, 1946–1964

TABLE 3: Penalties within the Party Discipline System (in Ascending Order of Severity)

TABLE 4: Expulsions from the Communist Party by Year, 1945–1964

TABLE 5: An Outline of the Party Discipline Process

TABLE 6: Expulsions for Unworthy Conduct on Occupied Territory or in Captivity and Treason

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

TABLE 8: The Role of Gender in KPK Appeals of Occupation Cases, 1946–1951

TABLE 9: Women in Occupation Cases in Select Raikoms of Kalinin Province

TABLE 10: Expulsions for Political Misdeeds, 1945–1953

TABLE 11: Expulsions for Political Misdeeds, 1953–1964

TABLE 12: Expulsions for the Loss of Party Documents, 1954–1964

TABLE 13: Rehabilitation Cases at the KPK, 1955–1961

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

TABLE 15: Expulsions for Administrative Wrongdoing, 1939–1951 119

TABLE 16: Expulsions for Abuse of a Service Position and Degeneracy, 1945–1953

TABLE 17: Expulsions for Administrative Offenses, 1954–1964

TABLE 18: Expulsions for Unworthy Conduct in Everyday Life, 1954–1964

TABLE 19: Party Discipline Cases Involving Drunkenness in Two Large Soviet Factories, 1945–1961

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 city party committee

kolkhoz collective farm

KPK Komissiia (or Komitet) Partiinogo Kontrolia; in English, the Commission of Party Control (before 1952) or the Committee of Party Control (after 1953)

krai territory

kraiispolkom territorial executive committee (a government organ)

kraikom territorial party committee

MVD ministry of internal affairs

obkom provincial party committee

oblast province

oblispolkom provincial executive committee (a government organ)

party collegium the body that investigated expulsion cases before they were

of the obkom officially decided at the provincial level

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

raiispolkom district executive committee

raikom district party committee

raion district

sel’sovet village soviet (council)

sovkhoz 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.

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 5 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 Rüdiger 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 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 Perm’, 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 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 O 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.

Introduction

On March 18, 1959, 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.¹ 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.² 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. The regime viewed its misconduct investigations as a form of moral education (vospitanie),⁷ 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.¹¹ 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;¹² after 1964, the bureaucratization and 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.¹³ 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 away from their prewar obsession with the political views, the class identity, and the supposed opposition activity of individual Communists.¹⁸ 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.¹⁹ 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.²⁰ 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 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.²¹ 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 1960s?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 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.³¹ 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 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 1960s, 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 Khrushchev-era party discipline is illustrated by the seemingly paradoxical fact that the number of Communists expelled for misconduct each year fell to an all-time 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 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 until 1958; 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