Communist Parties Revisited

Socio-Cultural Approaches to Party Rule in the Soviet Bloc, 1956-1991

Rüdiger Bergien, Jens Gieseke, Rüdiger Bergien, Jens Gieseke

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781785337772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

The ruling communist parties of the postwar Soviet Bloc possessed nearly unprecedented power to shape every level of society; perhaps in part because of this, they have been routinely depicted as monolithic, austere, and even opaque institutions. Communist Parties Revisited takes a markedly different approach, investigating everyday life within basic organizations to illuminate the inner workings of Eastern Bloc parties. Ranging across national and transnational contexts, the contributions assembled here reconstruct the rituals of party meetings, functionaries' informal practices, intra-party power struggles, and the social production of ideology to give a detailed account of state socialist policymaking on a micro-historical scale.

1

THE PARADOX OF PARTY DISCIPLINE IN THE KHRUSHCHEV-ERA COMMUNIST PARTY

Edward Cohn

In October 1961, the Twenty-Second Congress of the Soviet Communist Party enacted a historic change: as part of the party’s new program, the congress announced a new “Moral Code of the Builder of Communism,” the first formal ethical code in the movement’s history.¹ In the early days of the Soviet Union, as David Hoffmann has noted, many Communists had actively resisted the idea of a written code of conduct, arguing that “whatever advanced the cause of the proletarian state was morally correct.”² By the early 1960s, however, the attitude of the country’s leadership had sharply changed. Nikita Khrushchev and other party leaders had begun devoting more attention to the private behavior of Communists and other citizens, emphasizing in particular the need for party members to speak out against all violations of “the norms of socialist life” that they witnessed around them. The new Moral Code was an important part of this shift. It elucidated twelve principles that should define the behavior of all “builders of Communism” (both party members and other citizen activists), including “intolerance of injustice, parasitism, dishonesty, careerism, [and] greed,” and “mutual respect in the family, [and] care about the upbringing of children.”³ The new party charter, also enacted in 1961, added teeth to the code when it announced that the country’s party cells should “see to it that each Communist observe in his own life and cultivate among workers the moral principles set forth in the CPSU program, the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism.”⁴ In the years that followed, state publishers released a growing number of pamphlets and books describing the principles of the code and detailing the responsibilities of Communists, beautifully illustrating the regime’s new attitude to the behavior of party members.⁵

Although the enactment of the moral code suggested that party leaders were increasingly concerned with the behavior of Communists, the Twenty-Second Congress also endorsed changes that made it more difficult to punish Communists for committing misconduct. The new party charter, for instance, declared that a Communist could only be expelled from the party by a two-thirds vote of his or her primary party organization (PPO), rather than a simple majority.⁶ Many of the congress’s speakers denounced the crimes of the Stalin era and hailed “the triumph of the Leninist norms of party life” since 1953, which included a curtailment in the number of expelled Communists; party publications bragged that the number of expulsions between 1956 and 1961 had fallen to 40 percent of the total for the five years before Khrushchev’s secret speech, and that the figure for 1960 was the lowest in twenty years.⁷ Soviet leaders, in short, sent the country a powerful signal that expulsion from the party should be a punishment of last resort, representing a step back from the strict supervision of Communists’ behavior.

The result of these changes was an apparent paradox: the percentage of Communists expelled from the party each year fell to an all-time low at the same time that discussions of citizens’ behavior became more intense than they had been in decades. Khrushchev-era party officials seemed to care more than ever before about the behavior of Soviet citizens, while being less inclined to punish errant Communists than they had been since the revolution. This chapter seeks to explain the forces behind this apparent paradox. In particular, it argues that the Khrushchev-era party’s efforts to define and enforce the regime’s behavioral norms were driven by several competing—and often contradictory—forces, including the leadership’s desire for a larger and more vibrant Communist Party, its interest in fighting public disorder by Soviet citizens, its efforts to move away from the coercive and repressive tactics of the Stalin years, and its desire both to eliminate improper behavior in party members’ private lives and to avoid the embarrassment posed by the public discussion of Communists’ misconduct. Ultimately, these forces helped ensure that the public discussion of Communists’ behavior would increase at the very moment that the enforcement of the regime’s behavioral norms slackened—a fact of life that would continue, largely unabated, until 1991.

The Decline of Expulsion in the Postwar Communist Party

On 27 October 1961, Frol Kozlov—then seen as Khrushchev’s likeliest successor—introduced a series of revisions to the party charter in a speech to the Twenty-Second Congress. Near the end of his remarks, he announced that in order to prevent “the unfounded use of the utmost measure of party punishment,” the new charter would allow expulsion from the party only by a two-thirds vote of the primary party organization, rather than a simple majority. He added that the very institution of expulsion was on the decline: “The intensification of the party’s ideological life, the strengthening of party discipline, and the rise in consciousness of Communists have resulted in the fact that in recent years, the number of cases of expulsion from the CPSU has sharply decreased. We must continue to assume that exclusion from the party, as the highest measure of party punishment, should apply only to those who are unworthy of being in the party’s ranks.”⁸ N. M. Shvernik, the chairman of the Committee of Party Control, had made similar remarks to the congress two days before. “More and more there is no need to resort to the extreme measure of punishment, which is expulsion from the party,” he announced, ascribing this decline to “the restoration of Leninist norms of party life, the prevalence of the method of persuasion in educational work, the power of influence of the party collective, and the growth of consciousness of party members.” Shvernik proudly announced that the expulsion rate had declined by 2.5 times since 1956.⁹

These comments represented the first half of the paradox described in this chapter: party leaders were not merely reporting on a decline in expulsions since Khrushchev’s rise to power, but were also making expulsion more difficult and sending lower party organizations the unmistakable signal that they should continue to downplay “the utmost measure of party punishment.”¹⁰ These trends were driven by several important changes in Soviet politics. First, and most importantly, the rise of de-Stalinization had weakened the party discipline system and made expulsion from the Communist Party far more difficult, as Soviet leaders strove to repudiate “coercion” and to denounce the excesses associated with the Stalinist personality cult. Second, party leaders also felt that expulsion was incompatible with their goal of expanding and revitalizing the Communist Party as a force for change in Soviet life. In the years after 1953, the party grew dramatically in size, and its leaders emphasized the enthusiasm, ideological fervor, and political consciousness of the country’s Communists. Expelling a large number of Communists would hinder the party’s growth while belying its message of unity, strength, and enthusiasm—a message that was crucial to party leaders at a time when the divisive policies of de-Stalinization threatened to tear the party apart.

On one level, of course, the weakening of the party discipline system in the Khrushchev-era Communist Party was such a dramatic trend that Kozlov and Shvernik hardly needed to bring it to the congress’s attention. In the decades before World War II, most expulsions had taken place in the context of a periodic party purge, which typically resulted in the expulsion of more than 10 percent of the USSR’s Communists. (The party expelled 24.3 percent of its members in the 1921 purge, 11.8 percent in the 1929 purge, and 18.3 percent in 1933, for example.¹¹) The party’s Eighteenth Congress abolished the mass purge in 1939, replacing it with an expanded series of everyday investigations and hearings on the local level; in the late Stalin years, between 1945 and 1953, the party expelled an average of roughly a hundred thousand members each year, a high absolute total that never exceeded 3 percent of all Communists.¹² Once Stalin had died, moreover, party organizations began to curtail expulsion even further. The number of Communists expelled from the party plummeted by nearly 40 percent between 1953 and 1954 (dropping from 134,293 to 82,362), before dropping another 54 percent in 1955. By the early 1960s, the party was expelling roughly 30,000 Communists each year for misconduct and declaring that between ten thousand and forty thousand Communists had “mechanically left” the party when they failed to pay dues or attend meetings. In all, between 0.42 percent and 0.67 percent of the party lost its membership each year during the early 1960s, an increasingly tiny percentage,¹³ and the expulsion rate for political offenses and anti-Soviet activity declined by an even greater proportion.¹⁴

The single most important trend leading to the decline of expulsion was the leadership’s decision to repudiate the “cult of personality” and de-Stalinize the party.¹⁵ It was no coincidence, after all, that Shvernik dated the decline in expulsion not to Stalin’s 1953 death, but to the Twentieth Congress in February 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev had famously denounced the crimes of his predecessor. Khrushchev recited a litany of Stalinist crimes in that address, often highlighting the evils of the Great Terror and frequently mentioning the wrongful expulsion of innocent Communists. “A majority of the Central Committee members and candidates, elected by the Seventeenth Congress and subjected to arrests in 1937–38, were illegally expelled from the party, a gross violation of the party charter,”¹⁶ he announced at one point. At another moment, he directly linked Stalin’s egotism and more violent crimes with the mass expulsions that greatly curtailed the party’s size: “Arbitrariness (proizvol) by one person encouraged and permitted arbitrariness in others. Mass arrests and the deportations of thousands and thousands of people, execution without trial and without normal investigation created insecurity in people, leading to fear and even desperation. This, of course, did not contribute toward the unity of the party ranks and of all strata of working people, but, on the contrary, brought about the annihilation and amputation from the party of workers who were loyal but inconvenient to Stalin.”¹⁷ Five years later, Shvernik explicitly linked the party’s present-day efforts to change the process of expulsion to its efforts to combat the personality cult. “In accordance with the decisions of the Twentieth Congress, directed at the restoration of Leninist norms of party life and the liquidation of the consequences of the cult of personality,” he announced, “serious insufficiencies and mistakes in the work of the Committee of Party Control and local party organs, that existed in the past, were eliminated.” He singled out several “defects [in the investigative process] that were ingrained under the influence of the personality cult,” including “excessive suspicion” toward party members, the expulsion of Communists in absentia, and the insufficient review of accusations.¹⁸ The result, as noted above, was not merely a dramatic drop in all expulsions under Khrushchev, but the near elimination of cases involving dissent or anti-Soviet activity.

Figure 1.1. Communist Party Membership by Year, 1938–1964

The declining expulsion rate was also linked to another major initiative of the Khrushchev years: the explosive growth of the Communist Party in the years after 1953 (see Figure 1.1). The party had begun growing in 1939, after the conclusion of the Great Purges, and expanded rapidly during World War II—a period when party membership jumped from 3,872,465 to 5,760,369.¹⁹ This growth continued at a slower pac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction Communist Parties Revisited: Sociocultural Approaches to Party Rule in the Soviet Bloc, 1956–1991
• Chapter 1 The Paradox of Party Discipline in the Khrushchev-Era Communist Party
• Chapter 2 “It Is Not Possible to Allow Past Mistakes to Come Again”: Recruitment Policy in the CPCS in the 1970s and 1980s
• Chapter 3 Behind Closed Doors: The Erosion of SED Party Life in the 1980s
• Chapter 4 The Successive Dissolution of the “Uncivil Society”: Tracking SED Members in Opinion Polls and Secret Police Reports, 1969–1989
• Chapter 5 On the Way to Party Pluralism? The PZPR and the Reform of the Socialist Party System in 1988–1989
• Chapter 6 Communist Party Apparatuses as Steering Organizations: Paths of Development in East Central Europe
• Chapter 7 The Central Committee Department of Party Organs under Khrushchev
• Chapter 8 True Believers Becoming Funded Experts? Personnel Profile and Political Power in the SED Central Committee’s Sectoral Apparatus, 1946–1989
• Chapter 9 Paternalism in Local Practice: The Logic of Repression, Ideological Hegemony, and the Everyday Management of Society in an SED Local Secretariat
• Chapter 10 The SED Bezirk Secretaries as Brokers of Territorial Interests in the GDR
• Chapter 11 The Idea of Social Unity and Its Influence on the Mechanisms of a Totalitarian Regime in the Years 1956–1980
• Chapter 12 Foreign Policymaking and Party-State Relations in the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev Era
• Chapter 13 Erich Honecker—The “Leading Representative”: A Generational Perspective
• Chapter 14 Inside the System: The CPSU Central Committee, Mikhail Gorbachev’s Komanda, and the End of Communist Rule in Russia
• Chapter 15 The Ironies of Membership: The Ruling Communist Party in Comparative Perspective
• Index