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18Th Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party Chair (Joseph V

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18Th Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party Chair (Joseph V 18th Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party Chair (Joseph V. Stalin): Nicholas J. Fuentes PO/Vice Chair: Matthew O’Malley 1 Table of Contents 3. Letter from Chair 4. Members of Committee 5. Background 8. Topic A: Domestic Policy 10. Topic B: Foreign Policy 2 Letter from the Chair Comrades, I am Nicholas J. Fuentes. I have had a long and storied Model UN career which began in my freshman year and includes one term as Secretary General of the LT Model UN team in my junior year. In those four years, I have been a delegate in 20 conferences including Harvard MUN, Northwestern MUN, Washington University MUN, University of Illinois MUN, and Chicago International MUN. This committee is very simple and this is by design. It is my belief that the best committees allow delegates to chart their own course in history and pursue their own designs in accordance with their own interests. The chair ought to be merely an umpire and not a player in the great game of power politics which is MUN. It is this passion for a pure and unadulterated game of power politics that I have crafted a committee which does away with the rosy egalitarianism of a General Assembly and instead pursues a realistic simulation of the Soviet regime. There are two primary innovations in this committee. The first is that the majority of delegates in this committee have no personal powers; most are members of the Orgburo, Politburo, or Secretariat and as such cannot exercise executive authority. There are a handful of delegates, however, which can and will exercise very important functions of government. The members of regulatory and policymaking bodies will have to befriend ministers to act unilaterally or without a majority from the body, while ministers will have to caucus with members of the regulatory and policymaking bodies to pass a resolution. This disparity in personal powers will be compensated for by a disparity in expectations: you will be judged based on what you can accomplish with the tools at your disposal. The second innovation is that essentially there are no topics in the traditional sense. To even the playing field, delegates will exercise far greater autonomy in narrowing the focus of each topic. This allows for specialization so that no one delegate will have a monopoly on research or power in either topic which can allow for greater maneuverability. The overriding purpose of this committee is to advance the communist world revolution and you are tasked with doing this in any way you see fit, addressing whichever issue you see as the most pressing. In closing, I am a firm believer in realpolitik. I love the gamesmanship of a good power struggle and awards will be decided based on how well you dominate committee. This can be seen in four key areas: speeches, sponsorship of resolutions, command of procedure, and leadership. I won’t be looking for some polished brown-noser, I’m looking for the delegate who sets the direction of committee, who can pass a resolution, who can build a loyal voting bloc, and so on. I encourage you to research less and strategize more, less what you’re going to write but what you can use to accede to power. Lastly, this is Stalin’s Cabinet, and needless to say, I am Stalin. This is not to be taken lightly. Just as in 1945, in this committee I exercise absolute power and discretion. For any joke, speech, or resolution which I decide is disrespectful to motherland, I will immediately disqualify its author from winning an award. Good luck. Sincerely, Nicholas J. Fuentes ,If you have any questions, send me an email at [email protected]. 3 Members in Committee: Special Positions: (Lazar Kaganovich, Pyotr Pospelov, Nikolai Bulganin, Arseny Zverev, Vyacheslav Molotov, Viktor Abakumov, Mykhailo Hrechukha, Lavrentiy Beria) Delegates with a special cabinet position have the sole task of furthering their own power and jurisdiction within their sphere of political power. You will not be judged based on how accurately you imitate your position’s historical policies but how effectively you can exercise your existing authority and further serve the party with an expanded role. Keep in mind once again, that Comrade Stalin presides over this committee and does not take kindly to challengers, as Sergei Kirov or Leon Trotsky could attest. When gaining power, be sure to do so with great caution and with careful respect for your primary duty which is to serve the Party. Orgburo: (Andrei Zhdanov, Georgy Malenkov, Lev Mekhlis, Nikolai Mikhailov, Georgy Aleksandrov, Vasily Andrianov, Nikolai Ouromov, Alexey Kuznetsov, Vasily Kuznetsov, Georgy Popov, Mikhail Rodionov, Mikhail Suslov, Nikolai Shatalin) Delegates representing members of the Orgburo are encouraged to find ways to expand the role and the lifespan of the Orgburo. Within the present system, the Politburo has final say on Party matters, it would be in the interest of the Orgburo to prove their utility and expand their role in the decision making of the Party. As with cabinet positions, delegates are not expected to imitate policies of their historical positions, but to craft a strategy to more appropriately advance their interests. Politburo: (Andrey Andreyev, Kliment Voroshilov, Lazar Kaganovich, Anastas Mikoyan, Nikita Khrushchev, Nikolai Voznesensky) Delegates representing members of the Secretariat are in the unique position of exercising the powers of the Politburo. Using a personal directive sponsored by all members of the Politburo (which also includes Orgburo members Bulganin, Malenkov, and Zhdanov, as well as foreign minister Molotov) the body can act within its jurisdiction unilaterally so long as there is consensus among members, which can afford a smart delegate unique leverage. The position of the Politburo is the same as the previous two types of delegates, to advance the power of their body and their position within it at any cost. Delegates will be judged not on historical accuracy but effectiveness. 4 Background The Russian Revolution began in February 1917 in response to an increasingly repressive, incompetent, and lawless autocracy under the Romanov Tsar Nicholas II. While Russia had teetered on the brink of full scale revolution just 12 years before in the wake of a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War, the stresses of a full scale mobilization for war on Russia’s Western front in the First World War proved too much to bear1. With the majority of the Russian military advancing against Austria-Hungary, the then capital Petrograd grew increasingly vulnerable to extremist factions of fascist and socialist orientation. By the summer of 1917, the Russian military brass, top functionaries, and finally Tsar Nicholas II all having abdicated, a power vacuum had opened in the heart of Eurasia2. In the interim between the February and October revolutions, a provisional government headed by Alexander Kerensky formed as the successor to the Russian Duma. At the same time, however, local Soviets in Moscow and in Petrograd grew increasingly powerful at the expense and in direct challenge to the newly anointed provisional government. This showdown ended abruptly in late October when Vladimir Lenin, head of the Bolshevik Party, seized control of the 1 Kotkin, Stephen. Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928. Vol. 1. N.p.: Penguin Group USA, 2014. Print. 2 Id. 5 capital and began a systematic consolidation of power in the hands of the party apparatus which would come to wield absolute power in the new government3. For each government officer, a party member, a commissar, was assigned to ensure full compliance with party policy, in effect creating a government and a second bureaucracy to control it. A five year Russian civil war ensued, pitting the fledgling Bolshevik government against the former monarchists in the Russian military, spread out across Siberia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe. Additionally, World War I continued to rage on in the West, as the Germans marched slowly but inevitably to Petrograd, upon which Lenin had to order a retreat to Moscow, where the new Soviet capital would be planted. With decisive leadership by General Leon Trotsky and a whole rank of Tsarist officers, the Bolsheviks were able to destroy the last of the monarchists and secure the Western border by 19224. As this civil war came to a close, the civil war within the Bolshevik Party between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky had just begun. In the aftermath of the Russian Civil War, Lenin grew increasingly unable to talk, walk, and lead the party apparatus due to brain damage until suffering from a fatal stroke in 1924. Though shortly preceding his incapacitation, Lenin had awarded Stalin the newly created position of General Secretary of the Party, which although seemingly innocuous at the time, Stalin would learn to gain unmatched power through connections with the OGPU and Soviets across his new Russian empire5. 3 Id. 4 Id. 5 Id. 6 With the death of Lenin, a bitter rivalry split the party between Troskyites and Stalinists. Though Trotsky held tremendous power in the military establishment of the RSFSR, Stalin had concentrated power across the entire party and subsequently the government. As the head of the party, Stalin gained de facto control over the Soviet secret police, the OGPU, which he used to ruthlessly kill, expel, and slander his opposition and turn the entire nation, even the entire international community of communists against Trotsky. By 1928, Stalin had consolidated absolute power in the Bolshevik Party which in turn controlled the RSFSR which had absolute power over the Soviet Union6. Beginning in the late 1920s, Stalin began an ambitious project of collectivizing agriculture across the entire Soviet Union. Using an army of a few million functionaries to coerce nearly 200 million peasant onto industrial sized, state-owned, collective farms.
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