General Editor's Introduction These Books Attempt to Fill a Major Gap In
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General Editor's Introduction These books attempt to fill a major gap in the documentary material available in English on the development of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). At present there is a substantial body of translated ideological material, based on the collected works of Lenin and Stalin, running to 72 volumes in full, but reduced to more manageable proportions in various anthologies. This is undoubtedly valuable, but it slights a large and equally important kind of documentary material that has long been readily available in Russian and emphasized in Soviet publications on the CPSU. This category may be summarized under the label 'decisions' (re- sheniia), which has had a fairly definite meaning in Russian communism since the early days of the party. The party decision as a document appears under diverse labels, principally rezoliutsiia, postanovlenie, and polozhenie, and is at least closely allied to the programma and ustav, which have equivalent or greater authority. (Not all such labels suggest any particular English translation. Rezoliutsiia is clearly 'resolution' and pro- gramma is 'programme,' but the others might be variously translated.) All decisions of the party are considered to be formal and binding expressions of the authority of the whole party; they, and not the classics of marxism- leninism, are the operating commands. Decisions that represent the party as a whole and that are binding on the entire party are always issued in the name of the party congress, conference, or Central Committee. The former two bodies scarcely differ, both being relatively large, infrequent assem- blies that purport to represent the party as a whole. However, the authority of the Central Committee may be imparted to a decision in either of two ways: by an assembly of the entire Central Committee (a 'plenum'), which has grown from a handful to several hundred in membership, or (in the post-revolutionary years) by some part of its executive apparatus: the Politburo, Secretariat, or Orgburo. Just which of these latter bodies has acted in the name of the Central Committee usually is not revealed, nor are these decisions ratified by the Central Committee plenum or the party congress. All decisions have equal, absolute authority for party members. The importance of party decisions is emphasized by the special place they have occupied in Soviet publications. The main case in point, which is one of the most widely used reference works concerning Soviet affairs, is viii RESOLUTIONS AND DECISIONS Kommunisticheskaia Partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza v rezoliustiiakh i re- sheniiakh s''ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK (The Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Resolutions and Decisions of Congresses, Confer- ences, and Plenums of the Central Committee), the seventh edition of which consisted of four substantial volumes (vols I-III, 1954; vol. iv, 1960). In 1970-72 an eighth edition appeared, covering the period 1898-1971 in ten volumes. Some indication of the importance of this work is its editorship, which began with L.B. Kamenev in 1923, later included Stalin's personal secretary, A.N. Poskrebyshev, and finally assumed the imposing anonym- ity of the 'Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee.' While this work has never been suppressed, it appears that in Khrushchev's Russia it was supplanted as an active project by a 17-volume series bearing the general heading V pomoshch' izuchaiushcham po istorii KPSS (An Aid to Students of the History of the CPSU), which reprinted many party decisions along with other materials. Other major publications have also signalized the importance of decisions. From 1921 to 1935 nine volumes appeared in a series entitled Spravochnik partiinogo rabotnika (The Party Worker's Handbook). This contained almost all party decisions published from the October Revolu- tion until the end of 1934, and also a list of so-called ' circulars, ' which were of lower stature and were not published. It is probably significant that this was discontinued on the flowering of Stalin's arbitrary authority, and also that the series was resumed in somewhat different form but with the same title after the destalinization campaign in 1956. While the revived Spravochnik partiinogo rabotnika is an important Soviet reference work, stressing the importance of party decisions, it is far less complete than the original series of this name and also differs from it by including many non-party documents. Another type of important Soviet publication emphasizing party de- cisions is the thematic anthology, a few of which appeared in the period before 1953 and many more thereafter. The weightiest of these is a continu- ing multi-volume reference work entitled Resheniia partii i pravitel'stva po khoziaistvennym voprosam (Decisions of the Party and Government on Economic Questions). Other collections of decisions deal with such varied themes as the press, the military, education, trade unions, and the youth movement. Although we know specifically who drafted some party decisions, the majority of them are published in the name of anonymous party bodies, and draw their authority from these bodies rather than from any individual, no matter how prestigious. This has enabled the party to treat its decisions as the durable, continuous expression of its will from the nineteenth century to the present, unlike the 'classics' of individual leaders. While Lenin's works have long occupied a crucial position as classics, they can hardly be GENERAL INTRODUCTION ix said to represent the will of the party since his death in 1924. The fate of Stalin's and Khrushchev's writings and the personal reticence of the post-Khrushchev leadership has increased the significance of party deci- sions as the fundamental record of the institution. It is significant that party decisions, unlike ideological classics, have not been widely translated into major foreign languages by Soviet pub- lishers. While the entire fourth edition of Lenin's works in 42 volumes has been translated into English, no substantial part of KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh s"ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK has been translated into anon-Soviet language, nor have many of the individual documents in it been translated. These materials are mainly operational instructions for internal use by the party. While some of the published decisions are to a large extent hortatory and all are couched in marxist-leninist terms, the style of party decisions is generally intended more for command than propaganda. An important function of decisions is to point out and correct short-comings, which often makes rather grim reading, not very attractive to the outsider. Some decisions have never been published, and are not included in our collection. Although the party leadership is capable of disseminating directives secretly, it does not appear that they choose to operate in this way very frequently as far as formal decisions are concerned. To support the compilation of the present anthology, an attempt was made to prepare a checklist of all decisions that have appeared in print or have been alluded to in Soviet sources since the October Revolution (Robert H. McNeal, Guide to the Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, University of Toronto Press, 1972). While the total number of entries in this list exceeds 3000, only a few dozen more or less secret decisions could be identified through allusions in a wide range of Soviet books and periodicals. Here it must be noted that the definition of secrecy poses some problem. We must presume that we do not know at all about the existence of some decisions. Then there are some that were not known at all outside official circles for some time after their adoption, but were published in full or in part a while later. The modest number of these suggests that fully secret decisions are not very numerous. Finally, there are some decisions, especially of recent years, that are not published verbatim in the Soviet Union but are summarized more or less fully in the press soon after their adoption. All in all, the compilers of the present work feel that they have had a good opportunity to consider nearly all decisions made by the CPSU. The study of party decisions alone does not provide an adequate basis for the study of the CPSU. There are other categories of documents, many of which also remain little known in translation, and which are at least equally valuable. There are, for example, speeches, letters, and authoritative X RESOLUTIONS AND DECISIONS statements of policy in the form of articles in periodicals. (A particularly valuable assortment of such materials from the pre-revolutionary period was compiled by the late Boris Nicolaevsky and was kindly made available to me by Professor Leonard Schapiro and Dr. Harold Shukman. This material deserves publication, but it contains no otherwise unknown party decisions.) It would certainly be useful to have an anthology of these materials, but we concluded that the present collection would lose focus, though gaining in coverage, if we were to include such items. It was particularly difficult to establish a reasonably consistent policy on the inclusion of decrees by the Soviet state. The complex interconnec- tion of the party and the state in the Soviet Union for over fifty years has made it impossible to segregate completely the decisions of these two political structures. Some of the Soviet anthologies referred to above mingle party and state decisions, and many important decisions bear the joint authority of party and state organs, such as the Central Committee and Council of Ministers. No solution to the problem could be wholly satisfactory, but the editors of the present volumes decided that the best course would be to follow the general pattern of the standard Soviet work, KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh s"ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK.