18th Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party Chair (Joseph V. Stalin): Nicholas J. Fuentes PO/Vice Chair: Matthew O’Malley

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Table of Contents 3. Letter from Chair 4. Members of Committee 5. Background 8. Topic A: Domestic Policy 10. Topic B: Foreign Policy

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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 , 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].

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Members in Committee:

Special Positions: (Lazar Kaganovich, Pyotr Pospelov, , Arseny Zverev, Vyacheslav Molotov, Viktor Abakumov, Mykhailo Hrechukha, ) 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 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: (, 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.

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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.

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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 . Using an army of a few million functionaries to coerce nearly 200 million peasant onto industrial sized, state-owned, collective farms. This brought famine, poverty, and death to tens of millions of Ukrainians and Russians yet reconciled

Lenin’s NEP, based on private property, with the Marxist doctrine which the USSR was founded under.

After years of aggression, Nazi Germany finally launched a surprise attack against the

Soviet Union in 1941, making unrelenting advances into the Soviet heartland. Stalin scrambled to respond, but with an industrial capacity half a century behind the rest of Europe, the USSR struggled to mobilize its war machine. Only months later, the Axis powers had taken Kiev, laid

6 Id.

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siege to Leningrad, and set their sights on Moscow. A Soviet counter offensive drives the Nazis

back, only to reengage at Stalingrad in 1942. This marked the decisive turning point in the war

with no significant Nazi victories following their defeat at Stalingrad, losing more than 200,000

men. In 1943, after the Battle of Kursk, the Soviets go on the offensive, liberating Kiev, Belarus,

Romania, Yugoslavia, and Poland by 1944 until the final

surrender of the Germans in 1945. With the conclusion of

the war in the Pacific, however, an entirely new balance of

power takes root, based on nuclear weapons. That is where

you are left today. The conclusion of the greatest conflict

in the history of the world, the introduction of nuclear

weapons, more than 10,000,000 Soviet casualties, a new

American hegemon, the end of the European colonial

empires, a USSR industrial evolution, an emerging Cold

War, and a Soviet presence throughout East Europe7.

Topic A: Domestic Policy

The greatest domestic challenges of the USSR today are: industrialization, restructuring

the bureaucracy, and integrating new Soviet republics.

Out of the entire European continent, industrialization has come to Russia the slowest, if at all. While the British at once dominated 25% of land with their commercial empire and the

7 "World War II Timeline." National Geographic. National Geographic, 2001. Web. 15 Oct. 2015.

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French wielded comparable power in Indochina and Africa, Russia only recently linked its

capital to its easternmost point in Vladivostok by rail in the 1890s8. The problem of industrialization becomes especially hard when attempting to do trade with Western imperialists.

Though collectivization of agriculture was the most radical economic change since Stolypin, a new plan is needed to lead the USSR into the industrial age through Marxist doctrine.

The bureaucracy has become increasingly difficult to manage in the generations succeeding that of the October Revolution. While in the early stages of the USSR, it was necessary to maintain a party apparatus over and above government functionaries, this was only because so many government officials were former Tsarist era officials, and therefore a threat to the

Bolshevik Party. Presently however, nearly all government officials were born in the USSR and educated in Soviet schools, eliminating the need for the binary party structure9.

Since the foundation of the RSFSR, the challenge of

structuring the various autonomous Soviet Republics within

the USSR has been hugely important in maintaining order and loyalty in regions historically

nationalistic such as Ukraine, Tataria, or Bashkiria10. Though there is a model already in place, it

needs to be adjusted to accommodate Soviet acquisitions in Eastern Europe now occupied in the

8 Kotkin, Stephen. Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928. Vol. 1. N.p.: Penguin Group USA, 2014. Print. 9 Id. 10 Id.

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wake of World War II. While revisiting this issue, perhaps it may be beneficial to increase or

decrease autonomy of regions within the RSFSR.

Topic B: Foreign Policy

The great foreign policy challenges of the USSR today are: The Chinese Civil War, the

Arms Race, and the Post War Settlement in Eastern Europe.

The Soviet Union has been involved in the Chinese Civil War both directly and indirectly

since the mid-1920s. Though initially Lenin supported Chiang Kai-Shek by funding the

communists and social democrats working under him11, Mao Zedong now appears to be the

vanguard of revolution in China. Sino-Soviet relationships will be tremendously important no

matter the outcome of the civil war, though a policy should be devised for approaching China

with the intention of molding a staunch yet lesser ally.

The use of the atomic bomb by the Americans at the conclusion of World War II was

unprecedented during the course of the war and in all of human history. If the USSR is to survive

in its present state of capitalist encirclement, Moscow must acquire a nuclear capability. Methods can range from an aggressive policy of spying and infiltration of the US government or by developing a nuclear weapon independently. It cannot be stressed enough that should the US hold a monopoly on weapons of mass destruction, the proletariat revolution will be confined to

Russia and even Moscow will be threatened.

11 Id.

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Finally, the post war settlement in Europe presents a challenge for the Soviet Union. In incorporating provinces which were once part of the such as Georgie or the

Bashkiria, there was enough nationalistic fervor to resist Soviet power. Given that Hungary,

Poland, and East Germany were not a part of the Russian Empire, their penchant for nationalism will be greater and Soviet forces spread thin. A diplomatic, political, and military strategy must be devised to retain Eastern Europe within the Soviet sphere of influence.

Questions to Consider:

1. What is the biggest challenge facing the USSR today?

2. How can the 18th Central Committee restructure the USSR?

3. What will be the foreign policy of the USSR moving forward?

4. How can the USSR match the West economically?

5. Should Turkey and Greece be targeted specifically for their strategic value?

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