policing the party under stalin

EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES

Vol. 65, No. 10, December 2013, 19121930

Policing the Party: Conicts between

Local Prosecutors and Party Leaders

under Late Stalinism

EDWARD D. COHN

Abstract During the late Stalin era, many of the USSRs local party control ofcials and prosecutors entered into a

protracted conict over who had the right to judge the conduct of communists; prosecutors charged that party

committees were shielding communists from prosecution, while control ofcials claimed that party organs

were deferring to prosecutors and abandoning their traditional oversight role. This article will argue that

although some party committees were interfering in the courts, the dominant story of party procuracy

relations under post-war Stalinism involved the disengagement of party organs from the oversight of

administrative wrongdoing, with long-lasting consequences for the Soviet regimes attitude toward corruption.

ON 5 APRIL 1951, A. A. NABATOVTHE PROCURATOR OF THE KAZAKH Soviet Socialist Republicwrote a blistering report to his republics Central Committee. Nabatov began by

complaining about an epidemic of crimes by local communists in 1949 and 1950; many of

these offences involved embezzlement and the theft of state property, while others involved

hooliganism and violent crime. (One especially dramatic case centred on a party ofcial

who kicked [another man] in the region of his sexual organs, rendering him impotent and

thereby helping to bring about his divorce.)1 Nabatov quickly linked this crime spree to his

reports main theme: the protection ( pokrovitelstvo) of criminal wrongdoers by local

party leaders. Although procuracy ofcials wanted to prosecute each of the alleged

criminals mentioned in the report, the secretaries of their district and provincial party

committees (raikomy and obkomy) had refused to investigate them, forbidden their

prosecution, let them remain in the party and limit[ed] their punishment to a party penalty

(that is, a mere reprimand). All of this creates a long delay in the investigation of criminal

cases, Nabatov wrote,

especially those involving groups where several people are accused. The non-communists

[bespartiinye ] involved in these cases are arrested, but the communist who committed criminal acts

Nabatovs report appears in Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv rossisskoi federatsii (hereafter GARF) f. 8131, o. 32, d. 13, ll. 1420, with the kicking victim appearing on l. 16.

ISSN 0966-8136 print; ISSN 1465-3427 online/13/100191219 q 2013 University of Glasgow

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2013.848644

1

1913 POLICING THE PARTY

remains at liberty only because the party organs do not allow him to be arrested and tried, which

cannot help but call forth the justied condemnation of the surrounding population.2

As a result of this party interference in the judicial process, Nabatov concluded, large

numbers of communists had been shielded from responsibility for their actions and the work

of the courts had been seriously impaired.

For the previous ve years, however, other ofcials in both Kazakhstan and Moscow had

painted a very different picture of criminal justice in the republic, sending two damning

messages about local party organs: they were far too lackadaisical and disorganised to

complete their traditional oversight role and instead tended to defer to the procuracy in

investigating the misconduct of their members. A 1947 report from the Commission of Party

Control (KPK) in Moscow even illustrated the passivity of local party organs with a case

involving a communist accused of killing his own son, pointing out thatfar from blocking

his prosecutionthe raikom and obkom had ignored the case completely until after the

mans trial. The report concluded that raikomy, gorkomy, and obkomy of the Communist

Party of Kazakhstan do not conduct party investigations in the cases of communists accused

of a criminal offence, but decide the question of these communists party membership in

dependence on the results of examinations by the judicial-investigatory organs.3 KPK

ofcials issued similar reports in the years that followed.4

Conicts like this were not limited to Kazakhstan or Central Asia; from 1945 to 1953,

procuracy ofcials from across the Soviet Union charged that local party organs were

systematically shielding communists from prosecution, while party control ofcials berated

the same party organs for being overly deferential toward prosecutors. The prosecutors case

was exemplied by a 1949 report on the situation in one region byG. N. Safonov (the USSRs

Procurator-General), who complained that there are, in essence, two criminal codes [in

Kostroma 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.5 Party control ofcials, on the other hand, charged

that obkomy and raikomy were largely unaware of the details of their members behaviour.

Instead of organising their own investigations and using censure and expulsion as tools to

shape the values and behaviour of party members, they allowed the procuracy to prosecute

any communists they wanted and then merely expelled whichever party members the courts

had convicted. A report on party discipline from Murmansk lambasted party organs for

mechanically re-writ[ing] the decisions of the court, without investigating the essence of the

case,6 for example, while a 1947 KPK report from Voronezh found that 60.8% of the

communists expelled for corruption there had been sentenced to prison before the party had

judged them. This led the obkom bureau in Voronezh to denounce the provinces raikomy for

plac[ing] the consideration of the question of Communists party status in direct dependence

on the decisions of judicial-investigatory organs.7

2GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 13, l. 14. 3Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (hereafter RGANI) f. 6, o. 6, d. 795, l. 15. 4See, for example, RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 795, ll. 59 74 (for 1951). 5GARF f. 8131, o. 27, d. 4668, l. 126. Thanks to Yoram Gorlizki for sharing information on this delo. 6Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsialno-politicheskoi istorii (hereafter RGASPI) f. 17, o. 122, d.

190, l. 122. 7RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 200, ll. 39 40.

1914 EDWARD D. COHN

At rst glance, this dispute may seem like a petty turf wara power struggle between

prosecutors and party committees over who had the right to judge the behaviour of

communists, at a time when draconian post-war campaigns against economic theft, bribery

and other crimes made the consequences of prosecution especially high.8 This view is

sometimes accurate, since both prosecutors and party ofcials were at times driven by a

need to defend their parochial interests, but their dispute nevertheless casts light on two

important issues from the historical literature on late Stalinism: the changing internal

dynamics of the Communist Party and the regimes attitude toward corruption and other

administrative wrongdoing. In recent years, historians like Cynthia Hooper (2003, 2006)

and James Heinzen (2006, 2007) have argued that the late Stalin era was a turning point in

the history of Soviet anti-corruption efforts. Both scholars have suggested that the regimes

interest in combating corruption had fallen signicantly, and Hooper has argued that a

widespread and tacit understanding arose between the regime and its local representatives at

this time, grounded in a qualied indulgence of corrupt activities on the part of Soviet elites

and a redenition of the rules of party and state control sufcient to protect these elites from

overly vigilant public scrutiny or unauthorised prosecution (Hooper 2006, pp. 143 44).

The dispute between prosecutors and party organs, then, casts light on the internal workings

of the Communist Party, on the nature of the new Soviet elite, and on the Soviet regimes

attitude toward corruption at a key moment in the USSRs history.

In short, Soviet archival documents reveal that there was a broad consensus under post

war Stalinism that conict was growing between local party committees and procuracy

ofcials; there was no agreement, however, on whether party committees were overly

aggressive or overly passive in their attitude toward the judicial system. This article will

therefore seek both to reconcile the rival claims of prosecutors and party control ofcials

and to cast new light on how local leaders viewed the problems of criminality and corruption

within the partys ranks. Prosecutors, by and large, were correct when they suggested that

some party organs were interfering blatantly in specic court cases, especially those

involving high-ranking ofcials, but they sometimes exaggerated the extent to which the

party was systematically involving itself in the criminal justice system. More often than not,

local party organs were too disorganised, too inexperienced and (in many cases) too

incompetent to intervene regularly in the work of the courts; abuses did occur, and with

greater frequency than party ofcials admitted, but raikomy and gorkomy were often more

likely to be unaware of the crimes committed by their members than they were to intervene

in a specic case to help a communist avoid jail time. Between 1945 and 1953, factors such

as the recent admission (and relative inexperience) of many local party leaders, the rapid

reorganisation of many party organs, the gargantuan economic problems facing the USSR,

and the increasing self-identication of the party membership with the countrys

administrative elite helped ensure that district and provincial party committees would

largely cease overseeing the economic and political activities of local ofceholders,

allowing a culture of corruption to emerge within local party organisations that would

arguably grow in the decades after 1953. The changing political scene of the late Stalin era

thus gave certain local leaders the opportunity to intervene in the courts to protect their

friends, but the dominant story of party procuracy relations in the late Stalin era involved

8See Solomon (1996), Gorlizki (1999) and Hachten (2005) for more on these campaigns.


the inaction, inexperience and disengagement of local party organs in the oversight of

economic and administrative wrongdoing.9

Party and procuracy after the purges

In principle, the inconvenient fact that thousands of communists were being accused of

theft, malfeasance and other troubling offences in the post-war USSR should not have led to

serious problems, since the countrys jurists and party ofcials agreed on the principles

underlying the relationship between criminal justice and party discipline. Every Soviet

citizen was subject to the law and would be tried in court if he or she committed a crime;

communists who broke the law would be both prosecuted and subjected to a party

investigation (ending with a censure or expulsion, in addition to any legal penalties);

investigations by the courts and the party would be completely independent of each other.

This system included its share of vagueness and ambiguity, however. For one thing, the

Communist Party claimed an amorphous role in directing the work of the judicial system,

which lent itself to abuses;10 for another, the regulations governing party state relations

were poorly understood innovations of recent vintage (Gorlizki 1997). As a result, the

system was at great risk of instability when the regimes post-war efforts to bolster its

control over the economy threatened to swamp the judicial system with new defendants and

to threaten members of the countrys party elite.

When it came to deciding the fate of communists accused of a crime, the rules of the game

were largely determined by two documents from the 1930s. The rst was a March 1936

resolution of the third plenum of the KPK, which declared 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.

But the document went on to conclude that when a communist was punished by the court

system, the party should then investigate his conduct; as this suggests, until the 1930s there

was not an iron-clad rule that communists should have their fate decided by the party before

their day in court.11 The second document was a joint resolution On Sanctioning Arrests,

issued by the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers on 1 December 1938. This

resolution, a response to the Great Terror, was intended to prevent the arbitrary arrest of

party members and to end the indignity whereby communists were sent to jail before party

organs had had the chance to expel them. Its main provision required that procuracy ofcials

get the written sanction (sanktsiya) of a raikom secretary before a communist could be taken

9See Solomon 1996 (pp. 29-30) for a discussion of the differences between economic crimes and administrative crimes. This article will discuss the general theme of party interventions in criminal cases, regardless of the type of offence committed; following the 1946 and 1947 decrees discussed below, a majority of interventions seem to have dealt either with administrative crimes or with property crimes committed by state and party administrators.

10See Solomon (1992) and Sharlet (1979). 11RGANI f. 6, o. 1, d. 12, l. 12. Also discussed in Gorlizki (1997, p. 280). See RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 200,

l. 40 for a rare party report (from 1947) which criticised a party organ for violating the KPKs 1936 plenum resolution, compared to dozens of reports denouncing party committees for failing to discipline law-breaking communists until after their prosecution.

1916 EDWARD D. COHN

into custody. (The arrest of high-ranking ofcials in Moscow would require the sanction of

the party secretariat.) As Yoram Gorlizki has noted, the resolution was based on the

assumption that party organs would routinely approve any reasonable arrest request, but

some party chairmen construed it as blanket permission to block prosecutions until after the

party had decided a communists fate (Gorlizki 1997, p. 280).

Rather than clarify the relationship between party and procuracy, these rules injected much

ambiguity into the process. These regulations were still new in the years followingWorldWar

II, and the 1938 resolution could be seen as contradicting the KPKs resolution of 1936;

moreover, the endof thewar resulted in the appointment of large numbers of newparty ofcials,

many of them inexperiencedWorldWar II veterans, which forced thousands of new personnel

in both party and procuracy to undergo rapid on-the-job training. In addition, the economic

devastation left by World War II helped spur a series of sweeping campaigns against theft,

bribery and other offences that led to thousands of arrests, targeting ordinary citizens and party

members alike. This made the procuracy an important tool of the regime in reconstructing

society, largely through the prosecution of citizens for violating lawson theft, bribery, and other

forms of corruption and economic malfeasance. Many of the citizens prosecuted under these

decrees were rank-and-le workers or kolkhozniki, but others were higher-ranking economic

administrators or government ofcials; many defendants, then, were members of the

Communist Party, and their prosecution quickly raised the ire of local party committees.

One of the regimes rst campaigns for tighter economic control began on 19 September

1946, when the USSRs top state and party organsthe Council of Ministers and the Central

Committeeannounced a decree On the Liquidation of Violations of the Agricultural

Artel Charter on Kolkhozy. This decree denounced the incorrect expenditure of labour-

days, the misappropriation of kolkhoz land, the pilfering (rastaskivanie) of kolkhoz property,

and abuses by local ofcials and administrators.12 The decree was especially harsh in its

criticism of ofcials 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.13

The decree urged the prosecution of administrators and ofcials who stole from the

kolkhoz and of kolkhoz chairmen who violated their farms supposedly democratic norms

two groups whose prosecution would frequently lead to conicts with the party. The report

by Nabatov discussed in this articles introduction specically complained about party

interventions in cases brought about by the 19 September 1946 decree.14

Less than a year later, on 4 June 1947, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet announced

two more decrees on property crimes, known by the titles On Criminal Liability for the

Theft of State and Social Property and On Strengthening the Personal Property of

Citizens, respectively.15 The effect of these laws was to toughen penalties for theft: the

12The text of the decree, entitled O merakh po likvidatsii narushenii Ustava selskokhozyaistvennoi arteli v kolkhozakh, was printed in many publications, including Bolshevik (September 1946), 17/18, pp. 66 70.

13O merakh po likvidatsii narushenii Ustava selskokhozyaistvennoi arteli v kolkhozakh, pp. 67 68. 14GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 13, l. 14. 15For the text of the laws, Ob ugolovnoi otvetstvennosti za khishchenie gosudarstvennogo i

obshchestvennogo imushchestva, Ukaz Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR ot 4 iyuniya 1947g., and Ob usilenii okhrany lichnoi sobstvennosti grazhdan, Ukaz Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR ot 4 iyuniya 1947g, see Goliakov (1953, pp. 43031).

POLICING THE PARTY 1917

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 between ve and six years. For the theft of large amounts of money, or for

thefts involving an organised group, the penalty could rise as high as a 25-year prison

sentencea 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. Before the decrees, there had been widespread agreement

among government ofcials that the law on theft needed to be made stricter; after the

promulgation of these laws, some ofcials rounded up thousands of suspects to prove their

compliance with government policy, while others desperately sought ways to soften the

laws impact. A total of two million people fell victim to the decrees in court in a draconian

campaign studied by Filtzer (2002, pp. 25354), Hachten (2005, pp. 369407) and

Solomon (1996, pp. 405, 413, 42739).

These were not the only late Stalinist campaigns against offenders whose actions

threatened the economic recovery, of course: after 1945, the regime also launched

campaigns against negligence and bribery (Cohn 2007; Heinzen 2006). This meant that the

regime was pursuing a wide variety of different offences through its campaigns to bolster

top-down state control over the economyoffences that could vary greatly in their

seriousness and their motivation. Some defendants were collective farmers and factory

workers accused of committing petty acts of theft; others were high-ranking ofcials

accused of incompetence, negligence and corruption. In fact, the very same decrees could

simultaneously target very different defendants accused of very different crimes: the theft

decree resulted in the prosecution of rank-and-le kolkhozniki accused of stealing small

items from collective farms (for instance, a peasant who stole 22 kilograms of rye and a

security guard who took nine sacks of grain),16 but also led to the imprisonment of local

ofcials on charges indistinguishable from political corruption (for example, the case of a

village soviet chairman who stole 13,475 rubles, with help from the council secretary).17

One result of the late Stalinist criminal campaigns, then, was an upsurge in the prosecution

of defendants whose actions threatened the regimes efforts to bolster its control over the

economy. These campaigns targeted some offences that would have been considered

corruption or white-collar crime in the West and others that were far pettier in nature,

encompassing a wide variety of offenders, motivations and actions.

Under these circumstances, it is no wonder that the procuracy ended up pursuing cases

against a large number of communists; one effect of the late Stalinist campaign against

economic wrongdoing was an upsurge in the arrest of party members, for a variety of

reasons. Some of the defendants resulting from these decrees were ofcials accused of

embezzlement, bribery or another traditional form of corruption. Others were starving

collective farmers desperate for food, or factory workers who sought to prot from their

job. Kolkhoz chairmen accused of pilfering goods from their collective farms were

16Tverskoi tsentr dokumentatsii noveishei istorii (hereafter TTsDNI) f. 147, o. 4, d. 551, l. 195, and TTsDNI f. 147, o. 4, d. 551, l. 172.

17TTsDNI f. 147, o. 4, d. 1522, l. 124.

1918 EDWARD D. COHN

especially likely to be prosecuted (under either the theft decree or the decree on the

artel charter); this led, in turn, to a spike in the partys expulsion rate in rural areas. In

1950, for example, 10% of the communists expelled in the Velikolukskaya oblast were

kolkhoz chairmen accused of stealing either money or produce from their own collective

farms.18 Offences like these constituted a grey area between political corruption and

petty theft, showing the complexity of the states campaign for economic control. The

problem proved so large that the courts and the party even began to investigate

procuracy ofcials sent to the countryside to ght theft, who had been bribed with

vegetables to overlook wrongdoing.19 Taken as a whole, then, the economic decrees of

the late 1940s led to an upsurge in the prosecution of communists, many of whom were

accused of a group of loosely connected offences that threatened the regimes economic

objectives.

Although the precise impact of the regimes new decrees on the Communist Party is

difcult to determine, several party reports give an overall sense of the problem. A KPK

report from 1951, for example, noted that 234,532 communists had been expelled for

abusing their job since 1939, for a yearly average of 18,040 expulsions;20 every year

between 1945 and 1953, meanwhile, the party expelled between 30,000 and 70,000 people

accused of a catch-all category including the misuse of a service position (zloupotreblenie

sluzhebnym polozheniem), moral degeneration (moralnoe razlozhenie), drunkenness and

hooliganism. Moreover, the number of expulsions from the party for these offences rose

sharply just after the promulgation of state decrees against economic offences, jumping

from 37,904 in 1946 to 55,439 in 1947 and 68,516 in 1948, before levelling off.21 Cohn

(2007) has argued that the number of communists expelled from the party under post-war

Stalinism for violating state decrees on economic wrongdoing totalled at least 25,000

30,000 each year (a fact, as we shall see, that many procuracy ofcials ignored in their

reports on party interference). A 1952 report from Kalinin shows the full extent of the

problem on the local level. Embezzlement on kolkhozy, sovkhozy and industrial enterprises

led to the loss of 2.5 million rubles each year, reported a member of the KPK party

collegium in Moscow; just 29 kolkhoz chairmen had stolen 300,000 rubles worth of money

and goods. The KPK was especially worried by the fact that 11% of the people convicted of

embezzlement and corruption (rastrata i zloupotreblenie) in the province in 1951 were

members of the party.22

Together, these cases created a major crisis for party ofcials throughout the country. The

partys interventions in the court system were not limited to cases under late Stalinist

campaigns against economic and property crimes by any means, since local party

committees also intervened to protect members accused of hooliganism and other acts of

violence. But the late Stalin eras drive to stamp out corruption and property crime

nevertheless helped set the stage for a confrontation between party and procuracy in the

years that followed.

18RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 782, l. 4. 19See, for example, RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 12, l. 128. 20RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 6, l. 7. 21See RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 5, l. 166, and d. 6, ll. 73 and 174. 22RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 796, l. 25.


The prosecutors lament

In May 1946, a prosecutor named Sukhov from Saratov Province wrote a complaint to

the USSRs Procurator-General that neatly encapsulated the concerns of prosecutors

from across the USSR. Sukhov, a World War II veteran, had been demobilised from

the Red Army in March 1946 and assigned a position in the provincial 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 expel them from the party or to sanction their prosecution, and its secretary

told Sukhov that without his 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, Secretary Polynin answered that for

him this was not the law, but the law for him was the party charter.23

Sukhovs letter concerned the Procurator-General enough that he soon 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 also tried to prosecute kolkhoz

chairmen and other inuential local communists.24

Although the details of Sukhovs case are not all clear, his complaint suggests that the

inexperience of new procuracy and party ofcials was a factor that contributed to his

troubles; more importantly, his clash with the procuracy illustrated the importance of cases

dealing with corruption and theft in late Stalinist state party relations. In the years that

followed, prosecutors complained about interference by local party organs in nearly every

region of the country; in 1948 alone, the Procurator-General in Moscow received complaints

from ofcials in Ulyanov, Yaroslavl, Saratov, Dnepropetrovsk, Poltava, Krasnodar, Omsk,

Tomsk, Kursk, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.25 A majority of these

complaints dealt with the actions of raikomy from rural regions and a disproportionate

number came from Central Asia or Siberia, but the procuracy also received complaints from

major cities in Russia and Ukraine. Moreover, a large majority of these cases dealt with

petty corruption and similar administrative offences that were often punishable under the

1946 and 1947 decrees; a signicant number of the communists whose prosecution was

being blocked by their raikom were kolkhoz chairmen, and a majority were local party or

state ofcials or economic administrators who engaged in some form of theft or corruption.

On relatively rare occasions, a provincial or territorial party committee (obkom or kraikom)

announced a policy for all the raikomy it oversaw whereby communists could not be arrested

until the party had decided their fate.26

Several representative complaints highlight the concerns of procuracy ofcials.

According to a 1946 KPK report from Dagestan, the raikom and obkom there had refused

to expel a kolkhoz chairman from the party or to allow his prosecution until a KPK

plenipotentiary got involved in the case; even after the expulsion, however, the district

procurator still failed to prosecute him, fearing to spoil his relations with the raikom

23GARF f. 8131, o. 37, d. 2818, l. 2. 24GARF f. 8131, o. 37, d. 2818, ll. 21 22. 25GARF f. 8131, o. 29, d. 11. 26See GARF f. 8131, o. 29, d. 11, ll. 100 3, for such a case from Krasnodar.

1920 EDWARD D. COHN

secretary.27 As a result of complaints from the republics procurator, the Central Committee

of the Uzbek SSR passed a resolution in March 1948 denouncing the Khorezmskii obkom

and several raikomy for violating the 1938 resolution On Sanctioning Arrests by refusing

to allow communists to be prosecuted.

As a result of incorrect leadership of the procuracy and the courts on the part of the party organs of

Khorezmskaya province and a lack of oversight of the implementation of important directives of the

party and state in the areas of struggle with the squanderers of socialist property, speculation, and

violations of the agricultural artel charter [the obkom announced], the local organs of the procuracy

and the courts for a long time weakened the struggle with criminality, and several displayed a lack

of principle in their work.28

These examples are typical of the conict between prosecutors and party organs for most

of the period from 1946 to 1951, but in late 1952, prosecutors from across the USSR began

reporting on a new wave of attempts by party committees to interfere in the prosecution of

communists. That October, the Communist Partys Nineteenth Congress had added a new

provision to the party charter: In those cases when a party member has committed an

offence punishable in a court of law, the revised Paragraph 13 declared, he is expelled

from the party with a report on the offence to the administrative and judicial authorities.29

Within weeks, many local party secretaries had begun to argue that this article forbade the

prosecution of any communist until the party had decided his fate, as a Latvian procuracy

ofcial complained to Safonov in December 1952.30 In Irkutsk, the provincial head of the

upravlenie of the justice ministry (acting at the urging of the obkom) instructed all of the

peoples judges in the region not to pursue the cases of any communists or candidate party

members who had not yet been judged by their raikom and obkom. This order had resulted in

a slow-down of prosecutions and was giving accused communists the opportunity to destroy

evidence before their case could be tried in court, the acting procurator of Irkutsk reported to

Moscow.31 A Belorussian provincial prosecutor even reported that his local obkom secretary

had threatened his censure or expulsion if he decided to prosecute communists in violation

of Paragraph 13.32

A prosecutor from Astrakhan sent Safonov a representative complaint dating from this

period. On 23 February 1953, he reported, Astrakhans gorkom secretary had convened a

meeting of all the district procurators, peoples judges, provincial court chairmen and other

local judicial ofcials: Opening the meeting, the secretary of the gorkom literally word-for

word [bukvalno doslovno ] announced the goal of this meetingto explain to all present the

meaning of Paragraph 13 of the Charter of the CPSU and the order of its application. That

meaning left little room for debate: 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 organisation and

ending with the obkom, the gorkom secretary announced.33 The Astrakhan prosecutor soon

27RGASPI f. 17, o. 121, d. 463, ll. 54 55. 28GARF f. 8131, o. 29, d. 11, ll. 1 14. 29Ustav Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soyuza, Pravda, 14 October 1952, p. 1. 30GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 2236, l. 5. 31GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 2236, ll. 14 16. 32GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 2236, ll. 119. 33GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 2236, ll. 26 27.


sent a second letter to Safonov, noting that the provinces obkom secretary had held a similar

meeting on 21 March making the same points to a wider audience.34 These orders threatened

to bring the procuracys work to a standstill.

These complaints from the provinces were summarised by at least two reports sent to the

Central Committee by law enforcement ofcials in Moscow. In February 1953, one of the

USSRs deputy justice ministers sent the Central Committee a report declaring that upon

the consideration of several criminal cases by the courts of various union republics, there

have been cases of incorrect interference by party organs, impeding the timely and correct

resolution of these cases.35 The report went on to give six representative examples of party

organs that refused to sanction the arrest of their members. A raikom secretary from Kirov

province claimed that because an accused communist had only presented himself in a

favourable light, the committee had given him a reprimand, and refused the procuracy

permission to prosecute him for hooliganism; for over two years, an obkom party collegium

from Uzbekistan prevented the prosecution of a mine director for embezzlement by

claiming that it had not had time to decide his case; every case either led to a long delay

before the accused communist could be prosecuted or resulted in the dropping of charges

against him.36 Then, in May 1953, just after the death of Stalin, Procurator-General Safonov

wrote a similar report to Nikita Khrushchev. Commenting on the 1938 resolution on arrests,

he declared,

Neither this resolution nor any other resolutions of the Central Committee established any sort of

special procedure for the investigation or for bringing criminal charges against Communists, and

did not introduce any sort of special guarantee for members of the party. On the contrary, a number

of party decisions have said that members of the party are just as responsible for crimes before the

Soviet state as non-members.37

The 1938 resolution was meant to prevent illegal arrests like those that occurred during the

Great Purges, Safonov argued, not to give special rights to party members; he focused his

criticism on efforts by party organs to use the 1952 revisions to the party charter to prevent

the prosecution of communists.38

Reports like these made the procuracys position clear: party intervention was a regular

(even systematic) problem that threatened the legitimacy and effectiveness of the criminal

justice system. Reports by the procuracy make it exceedingly difcult to measure the extent

of party interference, however. In most instances, local prosecutors wrote to the procuracy

or the justice ministry with a brief list of communists who had managed to avoid

prosecution; they announced that these cases represented a major problem, but failed to

provide any statistics on the prosecution of communists. Moreover, in some cases where

prosecutors did provide statistics on the problem, their data did not back up their conclusions

about party interference. In 1948, for example, the chief procurator of the USSRs railroad

system wrote a report to Moscow alleging that his ofces relationship with party organs had

broken down over the partys failure to sanction arrests. From January to August 1948, he

34GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 2236, l. 28. 35RGANI f. 5, o. 15, d. 411, l. 27. 36RGANI f. 5, o. 15, d. 411, ll. 28 31. 37GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 2236, l. 116. 38Draft report found in GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 2236, ll. 116 22.

1922 EDWARD D. COHN

wrote, 1,511 workers in the railroad were known to have broken the law, of whom 779 (or

51.5%) were party members; of that total, 1,242 people (including 636 communists) were

convicted.39 These statistics suggest that the problem was much smaller than procuracy

ofcials claimed, however. In all, 82.79% of the non-communists accused of breaking the

law were brought to justice, compared to 81.64% of party members. According to the

prosecutors own data, party membership resulted in a decline in the conviction rate of only

1.15%.

Other statistics hinted at a larger problem, but were less convincing than procuracy

ofcials believed, especially when viewed in conjunction with other statistical reports.

A 1949 report from Yaroslavl noted that 501 communists had been charged with a

crime the year before, but that only 177 had actually been arrested; the arrest rate was

typically between 44% and 67% in cities (with a 1948 rate of 44% in Yaroslavl itself

and 67% in Shcherbakov), but it fell dramatically in certain rural areas. For example, 42

communists had been charged with a crime but none had been arrested in the Tutaevskii

raion.40 This report suggests that party interference was a problem everywhere in the

province, and an especially severe problem in agricultural regions; it is unclear how

representative the report was of the USSR as a whole, however, and it is far from

certain that the arrest rate would have reached 100% in the absence of party

interventions. As the next section of this article will show, moreover, other data

complicate the procuracys case: a 1950 KPK report from Yaroslavl detailed the cases

of hundreds of communists who had been prosecuted for corruption long before the

party had judged their cases. Of 519 communists expelled for theft, waste and the abuse

of a service position in Yaroslavl in 1949 and early 1950, 17 had been convicted in

1944 1946, 55 in 1947 and 204 in 1948.41 There was nothing stopping party organs

from blocking the prosecution of some communists without noticing that others had

been sent to jail, of course, but if nothing else, these data suggest that the party was not

systematically blocking prosecutions.

Taken together, these reports suggest several conclusions about the interference of party

organs in the courts. First, a small minority of party raikomy and obkomy seems to have

attempted to intervene systematically in cases where communists were accused of a crime,

especially after the Nineteenth Party Congress; these party organs were apparently few in

number, but constituted a real problem nonetheless. Second, cases of party interference

seem to have been more likely to arise in rural or peripheral parts of the USSR. Although

abuses occurred everywhere, they were less likely close to a major city and more likely in

Siberia and Central Asia than in European Russia, suggesting that greater distances from the

centre led to less oversight from Moscow, to more poorly trained party and procuracy

personnel, or to greater de facto autonomy for local ofcials. (The importance of new

decrees about theft and the kolkhoz also presumably led to greater issues in rural areas.)

Third, well-connected communists seem to have been more likely to be protected than less

inuential party members, and could be shielded from prosecution anywhere in the USSR.

Finally, a majority of party interventions centred around corruption, administrative

offences, and other illicit acts by local ofcials. This may simply have been a sign of the

39GARF f. 8131, o. 29, d. 11, l. 218. (For the full report, see ll. 123 219.) 40GARF f. 8131, o. 29, d. 11, ll. 43 44. 41RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 837, l. 8.


importance of the theft decrees: although statistics on party intervention are scarce, the

proportion of protected communists accused of theft seems to be roughly proportional to the

percentage of communists accused of a criminal offence who were expelled from the party

for theft. Nevertheless, this fact shows that the enforcement of the regimes post-war

economic decrees had become a source of tensions between local procuracy and party

ofcials, a fact of considerable signicance in late Stalinist politics.

The party strikes back

In the summer of 1949, two Communist Party ofcialsan instructor from the Central

Committees department of party, trade union and komsomol organs, and an assistant to a

member of the KPKs party collegiumsent the KPK a detailed report on the party

discipline process in Pskov Province. Their conclusions touched on a number of themes, but

one stood out: they were sharply critical of the obkoms handling of communists who had

committed crimes. In 1948 and early 1949, the report found, 350 communists had been

convicted of a criminal offence, and 215 were given prison sentences; nevertheless, the

party had only investigated 129 of those communists (or 37%).42 This was a sign, the report

declared, of several serious problems, including a passive approach to the oversight of

communists misconduct and an indifferent attitude toward the work of the procuracy. In

a majority of cases, the arrests of Communists and the raising of criminal prosecutions

against them take place, contrary to existing procedures, without the sanction of party

organs, the report declared.43 The result was an embarrassment to the party. The report

even noted that a high-ranking ofcial of the local milk administration was serving a ten-

year jail sentence for theft; he remained in the party and even had his party card with him in

prison.44

Some of the details of the KPK report on Pskov province are unconvincing: its authors

often suggested that local communists were innocent victims of unscrupulous prosecutors,

but many of them were presumably guilty of the accusations against them. The report went

on to allege that many procuracy ofcials were corrupt or engaged in drunkenness and to

argue that raikomy and the obkom of the party are providing weak leadership to the primary

party organisations of judicial investigatory organs and the procuracy, suggesting that the

party needed to play a more assertive role in deciding which criminals would be prosecuted.

Nevertheless, the report is more compelling in its portrayal of a disengaged and ineffective

party organisation, whose leaders most likely did not even know that they had the power to

deny the procuracy permission to arrest local communists. Local party leaders consistently

missed deadlines, heard party discipline cases in the absence of the accused, failed to

educate their members about their responsibilities as communists, and violated party rules

and regulations in countless other ways that were unrelated to the procuracy.45

This report was typical of the attitudes of party control ofcials from across the USSR.

First, control ofcials alleged that thousands of party members were being prosecuted by

ofcials of the procuracy. Second, they argued that party organisations were failing to

protect these members from arrest: in some cases they did not prevent the arrest of

42RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 819, l. 4. 43RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 819, l. 4. 44RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 819, l. 4. 45RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 819, ll. 4 5.

1924 EDWARD D. COHN

communists whose detention had not been sanctioned by the party, but they more often

agreed systematically to sanction members arrests without conducting their own

investigation. Third, KPK ofcials suggested that many communists were expelled for a

criminal offence based solely on their criminal conviction, with no party investigation, no

internal discussion, no participation by the party organ, and no effort to use the case to

educate the accused communist and the other members of the party organisations. In 1950,

for example, the Velikolukskii obkom expelled 234 communists for embezzlement and the

abuse of a job for personal gain; 175 of them (74.7%) were already serving time in jail at that

time. Sometimes party organs nd out about the prosecution of a Communist 2 3 years

after his conviction, the report concluded, giving two examples: a communist whose case

was heard by the raikom three years after his conviction and 2.5 years after his release from

prison, and another communist expelled from the party two years after his seven-year jail

sentence was announced. 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 offence,

wholly entrusting the fate of Communists to the investigatory organs, the report

concluded.46

Other KPK investigators reached the same conclusion. One representative complaint

came from Voronezh, which was experiencing an upsurge in expulsions in 1946 and 1947.

The obkom there expelled 310 communists in 1946, 38% of them for theft or the abuse of

their position; in the rst four months of 1947 alone, the committee had expelled 449

communists, roughly 40% of them for the same two offences. Moreover, 222 party members

had been convicted of a crime in early 1947, and a clear majority (135, or 60.8%) had been

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.47 A report

from the Primorskii territory found that the kraikom there often considered the party status

of communists only after their fate had been decided in court, thereby depriv[ing]

Communists of the right, guaranteed by the party charter, to be present at the discussion of

his party position and to give his own account of the matter.48 A majority of KPK reports

gave similarly vague descriptions of the problem, but others were far more specic in

detailing the negligence of the party. Of the 519 communists expelled for waste, theft and

abuse of a service position in Iaroslavl province in 1949 and the rst half of 1950, for

example, 17 had been convicted between 1944 and 1946, 55 in 1947 and 204 in 1948.49 A

1946 report from Murmansk, nally, noted a sharp rise in the number of expulsions, 70% of

which dealt with the abuse of a job, a theft or the violation of labour discipline. Questions

about the party membership of Communists accused of committing criminal offences are as

a rule examined by party organs only after the resolution of the cases by judicial organs, a

KPK ofcial complained, accusing party organs of mechanically re-writ[ing] the decisions

of the court, without investigating the essence of the case.50

Many KPK reports coupled their portrait of complacent party organs with an image of

unscrupulous, power-mad prosecutors, determined to meet their prosecution quotas under

46RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 782, l. 3. 47RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 200, ll. 39 40. 48RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 818, ll. 1 2. 49RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 837, l. 8. 50RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 190, l. 122.


the draconian post-war criminal campaigns. In 1945, the KPK plenipotentiary for

Arkhangelsk province wrote a devastatingbut representativecritique of the obkoms

attitude toward communists accused of a criminal offence. Fifty of the 178 cases considered

by the obkom in the last quarter of 1944 dealt with communists serving time in jail, he

pointed out; in the rst quarter of 1945, 35 of the 74 communists expelled by the obkom

were already serving time in prison. The practice continues, whereby party raikoms give

the sanction to the procuracy to prosecute Communists for unimportant offences, and then

expel the Communists after their conviction, the plenipotentiary complained.51 There were

a number of problems with this approach. First, the KPK ofcial noted, the courts could not

always be trusted to come to the right conclusion: seven of the 50 communists expelled in

1945 had been wrongfully convicted or had received too high a sentence, and the party could

have helped them avoid this fate. Second, the party discipline process was intended not just

to punish errant communists or to purge the ranks of the unworthy, but to teach them a

lesson while educating their fellow party members; persuasion and education had a place

alongside punishment in the party discipline process, and the party was failing to achieve

this goal. (This was especially true in cases where the accused communist was tried in

absentiaa necessity in cases where he was serving time in jail.) Third, this sort of approach

to the problem led to the systematic violation of party rules and deadlines on the treatment of

the accused, who had the right to have his judgment decided quickly and to be present at the

hearing that decided his fate.52

In a representative example from the report, the obkom in Arkhangelsk had expelled a

storekeeper on a collective lumber farm after she was sentenced to a year in prison for waste

and theft. Comrade L was red after an audit at the store discovered a shortcoming of 1,604

rubles, 1.5 kilograms of sugar and 91 boxes of matches, according to the plenipotentiary.

However, the disappearance of these items was far more innocent than the courts had found:

Comrade L had taken some of the money when her boss failed to pay her for four months

and had loaned the rest to some friends in the same predicament. The apparent

disappearance of the sugar was due to a faulty set of scales; the matches had been taken by

other administrators of the lespromkhoz. In this way, there was no deliberate squandering of

products or embezzlement of money, the report concluded; Before sanctioning the

prosecution of Comrade L, a young candidate member of the party since 1943, the party

raikom could have set her right in time, limiting her punishment to a party penalty

[vzyskanie ] and not sending her to court or excluding her from the party.53

The Arkhangelsk report is difcult to interpret. A cynic might charge that the KPK

plenipotentiary was urging local party organs to protect their own at all costs. An idealist

might claim that this report is proof of communists belief in the partys power to change its

members habits and attitudes for the better, or that it was an unusually honest assessment of

the draconian Stalinist penal system. After all, many historianssuch as Filtzer (2002),

Hachten (2005) and Solomon (1996)agree that thousands of citizens were subjected to

onerous punishments for minor or nonexistent offences, especially when the anti-theft

decree was announced. The truth, most likely, is somewhere in between. Although the

language in KPK reports occasionally sounds like its straining to justify the protection of

51RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 98, l. 52. 52RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 98, l. 50. 53RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 98, l. 51.

1926 EDWARD D. COHN

communists from criminal charges, the report from Arkhangelsk was extreme in this

regardand many other reports provide evidence of incompetence and passivity on the part

of raikomy and obkomy that is difcult to refute.

Moreover, very few reports limited their critique of Soviet ofcialdom to the procuracy;

control ofcials were also extremely concerned by the declining vigilance of the party and

the near disappearance of party organs traditional watchdog role. It is also very bad that

malfeasance [zloupotreblenie ], embezzlement, and waste are, as a rule, uncovered by the

judicial-investigatory organs, and not by party organs or by Communists,54 declared a

report on the work of the KPK between 1939 and 1952, before continuing,

All of this swindling [moshennichestvo ] took place before the eyes of Communists, and ignoring it

was not in any way allowed. But none of the members of the party raised the question until one of

the criminals was arrested. . . . All these and other facts take place because party organisations do

not full the function of control over the economic activity of enterprises, and stand aloof from one

of their primary responsibilities.55

Another KPK report, issued the same year but concerning party discipline in Kalinin

Province, used nearly identical language to make the same point, repeating the sentence

beginning It is also very bad nearly word-for-word. The report added that expulsions

take place with no party review and the decision is based completely on the courts

sentence. As an example, it listed the case of a man expelled from the party more than a

year after he was sentenced to jail for stealing 11,000 rubles (ostensibly because he was

appealing the decision); no one spoke at the primary party organisation meeting that voted

to expel him, which mechanically endorsed expulsion with no involvement for local

communists.56

What are we to conclude from the reports of control ofcials about party attitudes toward

criminality? At their worst, party control ofcials sometimes endorsed efforts to block or

slow down the prosecution of criminals within the party, perhaps out of a desire to protect

communists, perhaps out of an exaggerated hope that party censures could help errant

communists mend their ways, and perhaps out of a more reasonable dislike of the regimes

draconian anti-crime campaigns. More often, however, control ofcials highlighted the

dismal state of Communist Party discipline and the disorganisation of local party organs.

Although there were surely abuses of the partys right to sanction arrests, most party

committees seem to have either blindly approved most arrest requests presented to them by

the procuracy or to have sat by passively while communists were arrested without

permission. The story of late Stalinist party procuracy relations, then, was dominated more

by the passivity of the party than by its blatant disregard for the rule of law.

Conclusion

As Gorlizki (1997) has shown, the Soviet political leadership decided to become involved in

this dispute soon after the death of Stalin, launching several often-ineffective campaigns

against party interference in the judicial system. The leaderships decision was presumably

54RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 6, l. 8. 55RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 6, ll. 11 12. 56RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 796, l. 25.


shaped by procuracy reports on the problem; when a raikom in Tula voted to condemn a

judge named N. Ya. Tarakanova in October 1953 for her unwillingness to follow

instructions from the party, a wide array of national party gures quickly came to her

defence. According to the new Procurator-General, R. A. Rudenko, interference by the party

in specic 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

(Rudenko 1954). 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 declaring that, If

a member of the party commits an offence, punishable under the criminal code, he is

expelled from the party and prosecuted according to the law (Materialy 1962, p. 434). Party

and state ofcials unanimously reafrmed the principle that although the party would

continue to provide guidance to the court on the local level, interference in specic cases

would no longer be tolerated.

Khrushchev and his allies were surely correct to denounce party interference in the courts,

since even a small number of improper interventions could call the legitimacy of the court

system into question. Nevertheless, it remains unclear just how common party interference

in the judiciary actually was. Even a casual perusal of complaints from the procuracy

suggests that there were indeed abuses of the system by party ofcials, but Safonovs

warning about the existence of two criminal codes57 feels greatly overstated as an account

of the overall Soviet status quo. Peter Solomons analysis of oral history interviews,

moreover, suggests that although the Communist Party sometimes intervened in criminal

cases involving party members throughout Soviet history, direct interventions to block the

prosecution of party members were limited to the cases of big shots and important local

gures, even under post-war Stalinism (Solomon 1992, p. 9).

Two main factors seem to have determined whether local party organs intervened in a

criminal case. The rst, not surprisingly, was the attitude of the party committee

leadership. As reports from the procuracy show, certain obkom and raikom secretaries

were determined to maximise their own power and to defend the interests of the party at all

costs; only a handful of party committees seem to have tried to systematically block the

prosecution of communists, but they t this description perfectly. Committees like these

constituted a real problem, but were a small minority of the party overall. More

importantly, it appears that local party organs were more likely to intervene in the work of

the procuracy in rural areas than in urban areas, and in Central Asia and Siberia, rather

than in European Russia. One reason for this disparity may be that the theft and kolkhoz

decrees targeted rural areas more than urban centres, making arrests a priority high enough

for the procuracy to pursue even party members whose arrest was not sanctioned. (State

and party authorities were always more likely to crack down on corruption when the

corrupt act threatened an important initiative of the regime.58) Party committees in rural

locales and more far-ung regions of the USSR may also have been subject to less

oversight than urban committees, making it easier for them to exert themselves in

inappropriate ways.

57GARF f. 8131, o. 27, d. 4668, l. 126. 58See Cohn (2007).

1928 EDWARD D. COHN

Second, the status of the accused communist also helped to determine his fate. As a

general rule, for example, well-connected communists with high-ranking positions within

the party or state administration seem to have been more likely to be shielded from

prosecution when they broke the law; rank-and-le communists were also presumably less

likely to be prosecuted if they were well-connected within the party, although this

hypothesis is difcult to prove through archival evidence. Kolkhoz chairmen were a frequent

target of prosecution and expulsion, most likely because they held a thankless position

within the post-war Soviet economy: they had just enough importance to make them a

tempting target under the theft decrees, especially if their farms were not meeting their

production quotas, but they were not sufciently high-ranking to be safe from prosecution.

Some kolkhoz chairmenquite possibly the better-connected onestherefore featured

prominently in complaints about party interference, but many more were prosecuted for

economic crimes. Higher-ranking rural ofcials, within the raikom or the state

administration, seem to have been prosecuted less frequently.

Interestingly, the crime committed by a communist seems to have played a smaller role in

determining his fate. Communists who committed violent crimes like murder may well have

been shielded from prosecution less often than other offenders;59 still, the case of the

Kazakh man who killed his son (cited above) suggests that some party members accused of

violent offences were able to avoid prosecution. Moreover, at least some party ofcials

accused of rape and sexual misconduct were able to avoid arrest, although they often

managed to do so by exerting pressure from above to stop an investigation, not from a

refusal to sanction an arrest.60 In the early 1950s, the Central Committee in Moscow

received several reports about a Ukrainian kolkhoz director accused of engaging in petty

corruption, spreading gonorrhoea and rape; letters to Moscow complained that the raions

women were afraid to walk alone at night, for fear of the kolkhoz chairman, but when a

police investigator began looking into the charges, the raikom secretary called him into his

ofce and demanded, On what basis are you conducting an investigation without approving

the question with me?. Under pressure from Moscow, the obkom eventually voted to expel

the kolkhoz chairman (who was eventually prosecuted) and to give the raikom secretary a

strict reprimand.61 In a 1949 case from Molotov Province, meanwhile, a raikom ofcial

was accused of drunkenness, bigamy and the attempted rape of an under-aged girl; he

implausibly assured the raikom that [t]here was no attempt to rape the nurse, there was just

playing [balovstvo ], like with a child, ending up with only a reprimand.62 The raikom

ofcial was never prosecuted, and although it is not clear if the party intervened to protect

him, the raikom and obkom were willing to ignore serious allegations of wrongdoing

because of his supposedly heartfelt (chistoserdechnoe) confession. Overall, however, the

nature of a communists crime does not seem to have had a signicant effect on whether he

was shielded from prosecution; a majority of protected communists were accused of

59In the rst half of 1952, for example, 47 communists were expelled in Molotov Province in 1952 for crimes (theft, hooliganism, murder); a majority were probably expelled for hooliganism, but the inclusion of murder in this list is instructive nonetheless. See Gosudarstvennyi obshchestvenno-politicheskii arkhiv Permskoi oblasti (hereafter GOPAPO) f. 105, o. 18, d. 256a, l. 14. For two 1949 cases of communists expelled by Molotovs obkom after committing murder, see GOPAPO f. 105, o. 203, d. 377, and f. 105, o. 203, d. 817.

60See GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 13, ll. 5 and 28, for cases where prosecutors were denied permission to prosecute communists accused of rape.

61RGANI f. 5, o. 15, d. 441, ll. 235 38. 62GOPAPO f. 105, o. 203, d. 492, l. 7.


administrative offences, but that was because most communists accused of a crime under

late Stalinism had allegedly committed offences like theft and embezzlement.

Taken together, then, the rival complaints of the procuracy and the party paint a

disturbing portrait of the post-war Stalinist regimes efforts to combat corruption and other

crimes. Reports from the procuracy show that the protection of communist ofcials from

prosecution was a very real problem, albeit a localised one at times. Reports from party

control ofcials, on the other hand, suggest that the disorganised, lackadaisical attitude of

many party organs was even more widespread: more often than not, party raikomy and

gorkomy seem to have been more likely not to notice if one of their members was prosecuted

than they were to block the prosecution of a local communist. This presumably made the

work of the late Stalinist judicial system more arbitrary, and the decline of party organs as an

investigatory force undoubtedly helped increase the level of corruption in post-war society,

as many party reports alleged. In this sense, the seemingly contradictory complaints of

prosecutors and party ofcials discussed in this article were both part of a larger problem:

the decline of the widespread vision that the Communist Party was to be a watchdog against

corruption and wrongdoing.

One trend in the recent research on post-war Stalinism has been to emphasise the

importance of that era in shaping the Soviet Unions approach to corruption and

administrative wrongdoing. Both Cynthia Hooper and James Heinzen have emphasised that

the period from 1945 to 1953 was a turning point in the growth of Soviet corruption, a trend

that would culminate in the corruption of the Brezhnev era, while Hooper (2006) argues that

the period witnessed a striking decline in state and party oversight of corruption.63 Ofcials

from both the procuracy and the KPK clearly believed that a change was taking place, both in

the number of corruption cases and in the partys attitude toward them, and their reports

suggest a likely explanation for why local party organs were losing their interest in pursuing

corruption and administrative crime: the problem was not so much that they were determined

to protect their members, as it was that they were largely disengaged from oversight to begin

with. Factors like the inexperience of local ofcials, the massive growth of the Communist

Party during the war (and hence the ignorance of new members about past party practices),

and the growing association of the party membership with the countrys administrative

apparatus helped make party members feel like members of the USSRs ruling elite, not like

part of a revolutionary vanguard with a watchdog role in society. The regimes effectiveness

in ghting corruption rose and fell at different times in the decades that followed, but once the

late Stalinist campaigns against property crime and administrative wrongdoing became a thing

of the past, many state and party ofcials became less interested in combating administrative

misconduct. The lackadaisical approach of many party committees continued, however,

making the corruption unearthed by procuracy ofcials in the 1940s and 1950s more accepted

as a part of Soviet life.

Grinnell College

63This article largely agrees with Hoopers larger point about the partys declining interest in combating corruption under post-war Stalinism, while suggesting that the elites protected from prosecution under late Stalinism were not party members in general, but relatively high-ranking or well-connected communists.

1930 EDWARD D. COHN

References

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Filtzer, D. (2002) Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System after World War II (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

Fuerst, J. (ed.) (2006) Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention (London, Routledge).

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AbstractParty and procuracy after the purgesThe prosecutor's lamentThe party strikes backConclusionReferences

policing the party under stalin

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