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. The focus of that collection and the present one is the party, not the whole range of Soviet political institutions. Accordingly we have included no purely state (Soviet government) documents and only those joint decisions of party and state that have a particularly direct connection with party policy. These occur in the final, post-Stalin section of the book. It was quite easy to omit the joint party-state decisions of the Stalin period, because these seem to have been essentially state documents to which party ap- proval was given as a matter of form. In another question, however, the standard Soviet collection could not serve as an adequate model, precisely because of our desire to focus on the party as an institution. As the title of The CPSU in Resolutions and Decisions of Congresses, Conferences, and Plenums of the Central Com- mittee suggests, decisions issued in the name of the Central Committee but not on the authority of a plenum are generally excluded from that work. There are a few exceptions to this, but they are drawn mainly from the later Stalin period, in which congresses, conferences, and plenums were ex- ceedingly rare. However, as noted above, many of the most important party decisions have been issued in the name of the Central Committee but have in practice been the work of its standing executive organs, the Sec- retariat, Politburo, and Orgburo. It would be impossible to provide a fair impression of the record of party decisions without including numerous selections of this sort, and we have chosen those we found important. When a given document appeared as a decision of a congress, conference, or plenum of the Central Committee, this is indicated by the headings GENERAL INTRODUCTION xi

supplied by the editors. Decisions that bear the authority of the Central Committee in the absence of a plenum lack such headings. A special problem is posed by the successive party resolutions con- cerning the economic plans, starting with the directive that was issued in 1927 concerning the first plan. Excepting the Fourth Five-Year Plan, covering 1946-50, all eight of the plans have been approved by major party meetings, although the plan itself is specifically a state, not a party, docu- ment. In view of the party's stress on the importance of the plans and its role in their composition and execution, it was necessary to include some of the relevant party documentation concerning them. On the other hand, party resolutions on the plans are fat with statistical data and related technical information which is generally too detailed for the purposes of the student of history or political science who may consult our work and which is not particularly helpful to the economist. The study of the Soviet economy has gone far beyond reliance on the data in the plans, and the student in this field is more likely to want to start with the rich secondary literature in English, with its statistical material, than with the party resolu- tions on the plans. Therefore we have applied a compromise solution, which is not always easy to carry out. We have included only relatively short excerpts from the resolutions on the plans, covering the broadest policy directives without much of the statistical material. A related editorial problem concerns the reports on the work of the Central Committee that have been presented to each party congress, except the twenty-first (1959), since the October Revolution, usually by the principal party leader of the day. Acceptance of this report (otchetnyi doklad) by the congress constitutes a blanket vote of confidence for the decisions taken by the Central Committee and its executive organs in the interval since the preceding congress. The format of these resolutions of approval has, however, varied markedly over the years. When there has been a single party leader of unchallenged authority (during Lenin's post- revolutionary years and Stalin's maturity as dictator), the resolutions approving their reports for the Central Committee were brief formal state- ments that in themselves conveyed almost nothing. The reports them- selves were lengthy and general discourses on the state of the union; technically they are not party decisions and are better considered part of the body of Lenin-Stalin classics already available in English. We have therefore included neither these speeches (reports) nor the empty, short resolutions of approval. In other periods in party history there have been rather substantial resolutions, passed by congresses in approval of the report of the Central Committee. Perhaps the implication of this practice is that the party leaders wish to emphasize that the authority of the party secretary does not stand so high that his report itself can simply be rubber-stamped. The congress xii RESOLUTIONS AND DECISIONS

therefore chose to symbolize the corporate authority of the party by issuing its own resolution on the work of the Central Committee. These resolutions do form an integral and important part of the documentation with which this anthology is concerned, and they are included, with abridgements. Another problem of definition concerns the foreign relations of the CPSU and the USSR. In claiming the prerogative of guiding all forms of policy, the CPSU has for years been concerned with matters of foreign policy. An interpretation of the world situation and position of the USSR occurs in various decisions of a general character, such as resolutions on the reports of the Central Committee to congresses and the party Pro- gramme of 1961. While the Comintern existed, resolutions on the report of the Russian representatives to its executive committee also formed sub- stantial statements on foreign policy, as have some later party decisions, such as one of February 1964, concerning the Sino-Soviet dispute. The importance of such material should not be minimized, and it could be included in the present volume in keeping with the basic criteria concerning the definition of party decisions. With some reluctance, however, we have decided to omit material bearing on foreign affairs, primarily because it has already received substantial attention in specialized documentary an- thologies. (See especially: Jane Degras, ed, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, vols I-III, covering 1917-41, New York, 1951, 1952, 1953; Degras, ed., The Communist International, 1919-1943: Documents, 2 vols, New York, 1956, 1960; and Xenia Joukoff Eudin and Robert M. Slusser, eds., Soviet Foreign Policy 1928-1934: Documents and Materials, vols I-II, University Park, 1966, 1967.) The pre-revolutionary years of party history pose still another ques- tion of definition for this volume. This arises from the schisms that plagued the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party beginning with its Second Congress in 1903. While Soviet documentary publications in this field have naturally followed the leninist interpretation of socialist legitimacy in the pre-revolutionary period, the editors of the present collection are not committed to this partisan approach. Despite their serious disagreements, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were generally regarded as being part of a single party. Even Lenin's more high-handed schismatic meetings (in London in 1905 and Prague in 1912) did not dare to exclude unconditionally all of the Mensheviks from the party. The pre-revolutionary section of the present collection has therefore attempted to represent the party as a whole as it existed in this period. It is, however, clear that a full and final split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks occurred in 1917, and from that time we regard the party as the equivalent of its leninist branch. For this reason the various formal statements of oppositional groups of the 1920s fail to qualify for inclusion as party decisions. If the compilers of this anthology faced numerous difficulties in GENERAL INTRODUCTION xiii dealing with party decisions, the student who attempts to analyse them will as well. Although party decisions have maintained a considerable degree of consistency in their general character for over seventy years, their histori- cal environment has altered markedly, not only when the small revolution- ary party emerged from the underground and emigration in 1917 to be- come the ruling force in a vast country, but at two major junctures since that time. Both the Stalin Revolution of about 1930 and the end of the Stalin era are usually regarded in and outside the Soviet Union as fundamental historical demarcations. With this in mind, and not just as a matter of division of labour, the editors have therefore divided the history of the CPSU into four periods: to October, 1917; 1918-29; 1929-52; and 1953-64. Each editor has provided an essay characterizing the history and politics of the party in a given period, with special reference to the decisions published here. He has also provided more specific background information on individual congresses, conferences, and plenums of the Central Commit- tee, and editorial notes in square brackets in the text of documents to deal with more detailed problems. It is not easy to characterize the problems of analysis that the student of party decisions faces. Inevitably, the exercise of critical imagination is the prime requisite for penetrating interpretation of any human record, and this elusive quality cannot be summarized. One of the broad problems that the student faces is the emphasis of literal or concealed meanings. In any polity, and especially in the Soviet Union, it is a mistake to assume that all official norms and commands are observed in reality. Rules may be vi- olated, orders may be unfulfilled, rhetorical boasts may be empty, and the most important communications may be cloaked in 'esoteric language' or left unsaid. Insofar as party decisions resemble law, establishing norms for conduct, they should be read with the critical judgment that inevitably must be applied to such evidence. Even granting this shortcoming, laws can be a vital form of evidence about the goals of a polity. In some cases party decisions represent a form of super-law, standing above the legislative enactments of the state or usurping the constitutional prerogatives of the state. In other cases party and state authorities have jointly issued deci- sions, which are usually regarded as a species of Soviet law, hence endow- ing the party with a share in legislative prerogatives. In a literal sense this may be the only example of party decisions as law, but it is important to bear in mind that the party itself is in effect a state within a state. Its internal life is in practice excluded from the authority of the state and is regulated only by party decisions, never by state law. Not only the party rules but also other party decisions attempt to establish norms for this community. This practice grew out of the pre-revolutionary, social democratic period in the history of the party, when it was assumed that only the procedures of parliamentary democracy could legitimize the self-government of the xiv RESOLUTIONS AND DECISIONS party. Throughout the Soviet period there have been strivings, at least by some party officials, to establish a kind of rule of law within the party through the observance of democratic procedures and the publication of definite norms in such collections as The Party Worker's Handbook. Against this there has been the leninist tradition of arbitrary centralized authority, approximating an autocracy that is not bound by its own laws. In this spirit Khrushchev ignored the party rules when reorganizing the party apparatus on separate agricultural and industrial lines of command in 1962, without submitting this decision to a party congress. This mixture of rule of law and autocratic fiat in party decisions requires discriminating critical judgment of the student of these materials. Some decisions represent the former tendency, and may be read as ideal norms that will not be observed. Other decisions represent the commands of the autocracy, which should be observed to avoid severe penalties (even though all orders are not in fact obeyed, even in the best of armies). Although it is true that party decisions are generally more business- like than other media in Soviet politics, there is still an element of rhetoric in them. Unlike law and like Napoleon's famous orders, some party deci- sions (or portions of them) are intended more as exhortation than as operational commands. In this connection it should be noted that the compilers of these volumes have excluded from their interpretation of the category 'decision' the borderline species called 'obrashchenie' (appeal), which contains a high proportion of verbal froth as compared to serious orders. In most party decisions the reader will readily be able to distinguish between the elements of pure propaganda or marxist-leninist incantation and the practical business of the party. The propaganda may, of course, be important in its own right, reflecting the current emphasis in party policy, but it should usually be treated symbolically rather than literally. This raises the question of the non-explicit content of party decisions, which some western observers call 'esoteric language.' Compared to some other Soviet media that are often analysed (such as newspaper articles), party decisions appear to contain rather little of this interesting but some- times baffling communication. There are, however, occasions when it is important to understand the meaning of a given phrase in a particular context. For example, Lenin's use of the term 'liquidator' in the decisions of the Prague Conference of 1912 was meant to imply condemnation of all Mensheviks, even though the groups that were specifically expelled from the party were but a minor fringe of menshevism. In the Stalin era 'expul- sion from the party' was a euphemism for 'arrest as an enemy of the people,' and in the Khrushchev era 'cult of personality' implied a far broader range of misdeeds than mere egoism. It is also true that the silences in party decisions may be particularly significant. The representation of the great purges in party decisions offers food for thought in this connection. GENERAL INTRODUCTION XV

The présent séries of four volumes covers the years from the found- ing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party to the retirement of Khrushchev in 1964. This was not the editors' original intention. It had been hoped to bring the work as close as possible to the present, which meant the late 1960s. Two forces, however, dissuaded us from this plan. The difficulties in preparing and publishing such a work were such that it proved impossible to terminate volume 4 at any point in history proximate to the date of publication. Moreover, the character of the Brezhnev ad- ministration appeared less an intermission between major performances, as it had seemed to many informed observers in its first years, and more an era with its own integrity and weight, deserving a separate volume. The preparation of such a volume in fact began in the course of compiling and editing the present volume 4, and with this head start it is hoped that volume 5, tentatively entitled 'The Brezhnev Years,' can be published fairly soon after the conclusion of his period at the head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

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