362 Edward Cohn the High Title of a Communist by Edward Cohn Is A
362 Book Reviews
Edward Cohn The High Title of a Communist: Postwar Party Discipline and the Values of the Soviet Regime (DeKalb, il: Northern Illinois University Press, 2015), 260 pp., $49.00 (hb), isbn 9780875804897.
The High Title of a Communist by Edward Cohn is a welcome new book on a rather neglected topic of the Communist party in the post-wwii period. It deals with three main themes: the impact of the Great Patriotic War on Soviet society, the continuity between late Stalinism and Khrushchev’s Thaw, and the role of the Communist Party’s disciplinary practices in shaping post-war social and political norms. The monograph carries on a recent trend in the scholarship by focusing on the continuity between the late Stalinist period and the Khrushchev era. The chosen chronological framework of 1945 to 1964 shapes the argument of the book, while by singling out wwii as the principal watershed in Soviet history it continues the trend set by scholars such as Stephen Lovell in ‘The Shadow of War’ or works by Geoffrey Hosking before that.1 There are welcome comparisons with the rest of post-wwii Europe, par- ticularly in Chapter 2, which discusses the Communist Party policy towards communists who lived in occupied territories. Similarly, post-war attitudes to gender are treated from a broad comparative perspective, as are changing at- titudes to corruption discussed below. Most of the monograph, however, is focused on much narrower disciplin- ary practices in the Communists Party during this period. There is a detailed breakdown of the hierarchy of party punishments, illustrated by a number of individual cases, plenty of quantitative data on party membership and expul- sion rates. The core argument is the transformation of the Communist Party from a revolutionary party into a party of power closely linked to the Soviet administrative apparatus (p. 17). This is not a new argument, for example, Leon Trotsky’s critique of Stalin went along similar lines, but Cohn argues that the final transformation happened precisely in the period under consideration. This was due to several factors, such as the death of old communists in the war, a greater influx of new members (e.g. 20% growth in 1945–53 and 60% growth in 1953–64, from 6.9 to 11 million members), as well as the party’s in- creasingly middle class membership; sluzhachshie (the Soviet term for white collar workers) already constituted 46.7% of membership in 1945 (p. 21).
1 Geoffrey Hosking, ‘The Second World War and Russian National Consciousness’, Past & Present, No. 175 (May, 2002): 162–187.
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The evolution of Party attitudes towards political beliefs and activities of its members is discussed in Chapter 3. In keeping with the main narrative of evo- lution, as opposed to a radical break under Khrushchev, Cohn argues that al- ready after 1945 there was considerably less interest in political loyalty of party members, as the party no longer prioritized investigation of social origins or the political orthodoxy of the rank and file: “unless they were Jewish, rank and file Communists were less likely to be expelled because of their political views or social class than at any time since the revolution” (p. 84). Instead, educa- tion, training and nationality became important factors in determining party membership. In fact, this change is traced to the Eighteenth Party Congress of 1939, which signaled an end to mass purges and a broader acceptance of white collar workers into the party, for example, by eliminating a bias in membership admission requirements based on social background which had privileged the working class (p. 13). One aspect of the party evolution in the post-war period that could have been given more detailed analysis was the Nineteenth Party Congress, particu- larly the re-launch of party revivalism. As Yoram Gorlizki argued, this in many ways laid the groundwork for Khrushchev era’s focus on the Communist party as the stimulant to other social and economic institutions and reforms.2 Given its focus on the continuity between late Stalin and Khrushchev, a discussion of the party revivalism would further strengthen Cohn’s overall argument. One of the distinct features of the Khrushchev period was the rehabilitation of Stalin’s victims. Cohn draws attention to an important distinction between a legal rehabilitation by the state, and a separate process of readmission into the Communist Party. Despite large scale legal rehabilitations of Stalin’s vic- tims, very few of them were allowed to become Party members again. The Committee of Party Control (the kpk, the highest disciplinary body in the cpsu) restored to the party 5,000 purge victims in 1956–60, with further 30,000 reinstated or posthumously rehabilitated by lower level party committees. As Cohn notes, rehabilitation was biased toward former high-ranking officials with some 70% of rehabilitated communists being ‘leading workers’, as mem- bers of nomenklatura were known (p. 97). The low number of re-instated ordinary communists is explained by the fact that most of individual rehabilitation initiative had to come from below, while facing substantial bureaucratic hurdles. In keeping with the traditional criti- cism of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization as being selective for political reasons, Cohn notes there was virtually no one rehabilitated who had been expelled prior to 1937, the start of the Great Purge.
2 Yoram Gorlizki, ‘Party Revivalism and the Death of Stalin’, Slavic Review, 54/1 (1995): 1–22.
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The Khrushchev era also saw a change of Party attitudes towards pows, a previously stigmatized group, although Cohn argues that this seems to have been reversed after 1959 as the rehabilitation achieved most of political goals (p. 105). Likewise, the purges of the security organs of those responsible for breaches of “socialist legality” were very few and highly selective even at the peak of de-Stalinization (p. 110–12). This allowed the party to present itself as a victim rather than the perpetrator of the purges without destabilizing the regime, which still relied on the security services for its stability. The last three chapters deal with specific issues that preoccupied Party local organizations: economic misdemeanors or corruption; family affairs of party members; and the persistent problem of drunkenness among party members. Chapter 4 accordingly examines how the Party officials handled cases of corruption, administrative misconduct and economic crimes by its members. These were the most common causes of expulsion from the Party, with some 300,000 communists losing their party membership in 1945–1964 on that basis (p. 116). There is a welcome discussion of general literature on the subject of corruption and its relation to the Soviet Union, showing that the Soviet under- standing of corruption was becoming strikingly similar to the Western political science’s definition of it as “using public office for private gain” (what Cohn calls “service position” sluzhebnoe polozhenie, perhaps better translated into English as “official position”). This was reflected in the shift of labelling eco- nomic crimes from politically charged terms of “sabotage” and “bourgeois ac- cumulation” common in the 1930s, to “the abuse of service position for private gain” after the war (p. 122). This discussion of corruption is focused mostly on the late Stalinist period, noting relatively tolerant attitudes towards corruption under Stalin, particu- larly at a local level as shown, for example, in cases of currency manipulation in the city of Molotov’s obkom during the 1947 currency reform (p. 128). The Khrushchev period had its share of anti-corruption campaigns too, with some 10,000 communists expelled annually. However, these anti-corruption campaigns were on the whole much less stringent, with the rate of expulsions being a third of that under Stalin. This lower rate of expulsion reflected what Cohn persistently draws attention to: a significant change in Party discipline under Khrushchev, namely its increasing emphasis on the persuasion and edu- cation of its members, rather than on punishment as before (p. 138). Although the party under Khrushchev became less repressive, at least judg- ing by the number of expulsions, Cohn argues that at the same time it became much more intrusive into private lives of its members (p. 142). According to Cohn, one of the notable changes in the Khrushchev period was the emphasis on education by means of public pressure (152–153). This could take various
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the soviet and post-soviet review 44 (2017) 357-378Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 11:57:53PM via free access
Alexander Titov Queen’s University, Belfast [email protected]
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