POWER AND EVERYDAY LIFE
AT SVERDLOV
COMMUNIST UNIVERSITY
The urge not only to transform politics, economics and society but to remold the “whole of human life” struck the cultural critic Fülöp-Miller in 1926 as the distinguishing mark of the Bolshevik Revolution.1 The insight was inspired by the juncture at which he wrote, for the 1920s witnessed the most intense debate perhaps in Russia’s history about human transformation. The culture-building and educational mission of the “transition period” turned the Revolution inward; the entrenchment of the new order spurred an attempt to mark the revolutionary in all spheres. The building of a new culture and a New Man, a defining concern of the 1920s in general and party students in particular, was to begin with the revolutionizing of everyday life.
The most significant exploration of early Soviet experiments in life-style since Fülöp-Miller conceptually severed grassroots activity and innovation from the grimly regimented utopianism from above associated with the triumph of Stalin.2 Yet the explosive expansion of the revolutionary and the political into previously uncharted territories preoccupied the revolutionary project precisely when the entire party disciplinary system was entrenched in the 1920s. Uncovering the links, rather than the disjunction, between the evolving political order and the half-imagined, half-apparent “new way of life” can be seen as a central historical problem of the direction of the revolutionary enterprise.
Sverdlov Communist University, the first higher party school created after the Revolution, lies at the epicenter of 1920s experimentation as it intersected with the inner-party regime. Communist student youth, Sverdlovians most active among them, were the single most ardent group behind the search for a new everyday life (byt) and at the same time were a focal point for the Party’s concern for the outlook of the new generation. As the model communist university, this institution also led such experiments as the adaptation of imported theories of American progressive pedagogy to the needs of the Revolution, with the hope of revising the nature of higher education. Such endeavors occurred under the auspices of a Communist Party institution, racked by constant political battles, and fully embedded in the Party’s world of power relations.
Debates about lifestyle and the new learning assumed a central place at Sverdlov Communist University because they revolved directly around both liberation and power. The ambitious plans to alter the pedagogical heart of higher education explicitly aimed at reducing the rigid professorial authority held to be characteristic of the old universities. The elaboration of a new lifestyle, in similar fashion, was to unshackle the communist from the constraints of hypocritical bourgeois morality and indeed the patterns of prerevolutionary civilization. This search for liberation, of course, was made under a collectivist banner. Commu̇nist students fought to obliterate the private sphere perceived in the bourgeois past and present. Yet the quest for collective values to replace “individualism” characteristically overlapped with the agendas of party disciplinary organs as they also participated in the first attempts to articulate a communist code of behavior. Emancipatory plans to replace old power hierarchies were implemented within a newly established, communist system of power relationships. The revolutionary innovations of this emancipatory agenda mingled with new patterns of coercion in a manner opposite from all declared intentions.
This postrevolutionary fusion, exemplified with particular starkness in the communist student and youth movement but so typical of the communist project as a whole, holds implications for reinterpreting everyday political life in the 1920s. Politics at Sverdlov University, as at all Soviet institutions, cannot be understood outside the context of party cell politics, and for the first time we can trace the history and evolution of a single party cell. This inquiry not only shows the particular manner in which everyday life at Sverdlov University was politicized, but how party cell politics was pervaded by the debate about everyday life. The activities of the Sverdlov party cell over a decade show a preoccupation with questions of byt, ethics, collectivism, and behavior along with opposition and the inner-party regime. The activities of this particular cell, of course, were stamped by the quest for living revolution as it gripped the communist student movement in particular, but they also reveal a key element in the evolution of Bolshevik “party discipline” as a whole. Deviance in “communist morality” and lifestyle became intimately associated with political and ideological deviation, and not just among revolutionary students. The links were institutionalized first and foremost in the Party’s highest disciplinary organ, the Central Control Commission (TsKK).
Party cell politics was connected to byt in another sense as well. The cell was simultaneously the building block of communist mas s organization, the basic unit of the party disciplinary regime, and the bastion of rank and file “everyday” political life. As the Party emerged from its formative civil war–era centralization and militarization of its chain of command, a rift between the “lowers” (nizy) and “uppers” (verkhi) burst into public view. Along with the top-down power arrangements, it was resentment of party officials’ privileges, luxuries, and lifestyles—the same concerns that launched the 1920s search for a new byt–that spawned tensions over disjunctions between emancipatory promises and dictatorial practices that festered throughout the decade.3 Questions of lifestyle were thus not just the preserve of utopian dreamers but at the center of party politics, party discipline, and inner-party reactions to the party dictatorship. Even as the growth of party cells in the 1920s mark one of the fundamental developments of the Soviet era in higher educational institutions, the subordination of the rank and file became at Sverdlov the key to local politics and the symbolic point of departure for discussions of inner-party democracy.
Stalin’s Great Break, at Sverdlov University and elsewhere, was launched in the turmoil of a “democratization” campaign within the Party. The birth of the Stalin era cannot be understood outside the context of this central phenomenon, which appears neither as Orwellian double-speak nor as a “genuine” revolt “from below.” Set against the background of a decade-long, frustrated search for liberation—intertwined with the refinement of a communist system of power relations extending into everyday life—it emerges as an epochal shift in the power hierarchy of NEP, one which transformed the resentments of a subordinated rank and file into a potent force to be unleashed and manipulated. But the elusive 1920s search for liberation by this time had endowed the entire disciplinary regime within the Party with an extended field of play.
The Rise of the First Communist University
This new vehicle for party education—the first higher party school—emerged only gradually out of what were seen as the Party’s most urgent organizational tasks. Indeed, a new type of university was several years away from the short courses for agitators that were initiated even before the Bolshevik rise to power. Between June 1917 and March 1918 tens of thousands went through rapid training sessions organized by Iakov Sverdlov and the military organization of the Bolshevik Central Committee in Petrograd. “Having heard a couple of lectures, taking along a couple dozen brochures, the soldier, worker, or peasant set out for the countryside.”4 Sverdlov proposed similar courses in Moscow with broader programs, and on 10 June 1918 these were set up by G.I. Teodorovich of the agitation section of the VTsIK as the School of Soviet and Party Work.
From training agitators in the early revolutionary months, these Moscow courses shifted from 1918 to 1920 to preparing officials for specific branches of the commissariats and local party organizations. State institutions and the Red Army shipped off their own candidates to the school, and the students usually returned after study to the organization that had nominated them. Thus students “majored” in the Cheka, the Worker-Peasant Inspectorate, the VSNKh, or other commissariats. Within this framework, the teachers, the bulk of whom were high state or party officials, attempted to impart a general Marxist pool of knowledge. The section for the commissariat of labor in 1920, for example, boasted lectures on the history of the trade union movement by the Profintern leader Lozovskii, but more attention was paid to topics such as new Soviet labor legislation, methods of mobilizing workers, and statistics. By far the most time was spent in “practical study” in the branches of the commissariat itself.5
Only slowly did a broader course of study emerge that presaged the creation of a party university. The Ninth Party Congress of March 1919 resolved to tum the courses into a “higher party school,” but of the 4,417 students passing through between June 1918 and November 1919, only 263 directly took up party posts: 900 went into the state apparatus and 3,253 were sent to the front. A significant step was taken in the fall of 1919, when the school administration decided to lengthen the course of study to six months, half of which became devoted to a “general-theoretical” section designed in the Central Committee. This section offered instruction in such areas as Russian and Western history, law, political economy, and current politics and was thus reminiscent of the prerevolutionary underground party schools. In 1920 such party leaders as Skvortsov-Stepanov, Lunacharskii, and Bubnov were lecturing as the school moved away from the cornmissariat-based system. As at the Socialist Academy, a specifically party identity was fully elaborated only in 1920–21; in its charter of 1921 Sverdlov was formally baptized “a Higher Party School under the ideological influence of the Central Committee, the goal of which is to train workers and peasants in the theory and practice of communism.”6
This evolution from agitator training to state-building to party university between 1917 and 1921 occurred at Sverdlov for several reasons. As early attempts to reform the old universities foundered, the fledgling party school, precisely because it did not at first pretend to university-level training, was able to build up a revolutionary and pro-Bolshevik constituency. In 1919–20, for example, 45.7 percent of the students were listed as workers; 12 percent of all students were former metalworkers. The bulk of students had only a primary education, and in 1919 the vast majority were newly enrolled Communists.7 It was the hopes invested in this sociopolitical profile, notwithstanding the modest and utilitarian character of the initial program, that set the new institution apart and seemed to assure the beginning of a grand transformation of all higher learning. One chemistry teacher recalled his first Sverdlov lectures, held in an auditorium of Moscow University: “The chemistry hall greeted students of a kind never seen in the history of Moscow University. It was unbearably cold in that auditorium—four degrees below zero. Hundreds of eyes impatiently and greedily gazed at the lecturer. . . . Workers and peasants carne to old Moscow University as the first regiments sent by the proletarian revolution.”8
The school’s central location and sponsorship by the Central Committee made it the logical choice for the creation of the preeminent higher party school. A Central Committee commission was formed in 1920 to plan a three-year university program at Sverdlov; staffed by leading Bolshevik intellectuals, it was headed by the first rector, Vladimir Ivanovich Nevskii, an Old Bolshevik who had studied natural science at Moscow University in the late 1890s and later graduated from Kharkov University in 1911. The reorganized Sverdlov University soon drew up plans for the second communist university in Petrograd (named after Zinov'ev), and by extension for the rising network of higher party schools.9 Nevskii insisted on the introduction of natural science into the Sverdlov curriculum, a move opposed by Riazanov as extraneous to Marxist social science, but endorsed on appeal by Lenin. The transition to a party university thus encompassed a shift to general education and an incorporation of natural as well as social science, and in the early to mid-1920s the first two elements still roughly balanced Marxist and political education in the standard communist university curriculum. Thus new higher educational concerns were layered onto already well-honed preoccupations with political instruction and the production of serviceable cadres.10
This widening focus is significant, beca use the birth of the communist university simultaneously combined a particularistic identification with the Party and a broadening of curriculum that was associated with a higher school. The consolidation of this new educational form might be compared to the cours révolutionnaires of the French Revolution of 1793–94—crash courses set up to train skilled workers loyal to the revolutionary regime. A revolutionized curriculum was equated with everything accelerated and modern. “There were ‘revolutionary processes of tanning’ and there was ‘revolutionary . . . manufacture of gunpowder.’ Even books were supposed to be sorted in a ‘revolutionary’ manner.” From this beginning emerged a new type of institution, the École Polytechnique, which then formed the basis for a new system of higher education.11 In the October Revolution, it was characteristically the training of agitators and functionaries, and the assimilation of social and political knowledge, that formed the basis of the frenetic revolutionary courses; but by 1921 the consolidated new educational system had been embodied in the communist university.
The civil war was not a time for most young Bolsheviks to spend in study. But by 1920—21 a new cadre of revolutionary students had begun to form, the vast majority of whom at Sverdlov were males who had served in the Red Army.12 This dealt a shattering blow to the already fractured ideal of a unified student movement and its embattled traditions of corporate unity. As old traditions of student activism in the universities were now turned against the Bolsheviks, the new party institution (and the rabfaks) held out the possibility for reconstructing the student body and its political affiliation. By the early 1920s, on the heels of the splintering of the old student movement and the targeting of many of its anti-Bolshevik activists, a new student tradition had been reinvented with its center of gravity among the communist students. Sverdlov University played a role in developing a self-consciously distinctive outlook, morals, dress, and élan for the new communist student movement. As a Sverdlov rector noted shortly thereafter, “They say it proudly: ‘We are Sverdlovtsy.’ They have founded certain traditions; they have their own songs.” One communist student (and future red professor) even argued that there had emerged a new social type, the proletarian student-scholar cum Bolshevik revolutionary. The Sverdlov student, it was approvingly noted, could be easily picked out in a crowd.13
The revolutionary student identity, and within it the Sverdlov institutional loyalty, comprised a distinctive subculture within the Party. The emergence of the new communist studenchestvo of the 1920s, which recapitulated much of the intense social zeal of its prerevolutionary counterpart, lay at the roots of the party students’ intensive engagement with fashioning a revolutionary way of life. The group identity also contributed to Sverdlovians’ particular political forcefulness as privileged activists yet, simultaneously, rank and filers, as they openly revolted against and then covertly resisted an institutional power structure that invested supreme power in a rector appointed by the Central Committee.
Permutations of Party Cell Politics:
Shifting Resentments of the Rank and File
The Sverdlov party cell was founded in 1920 in the corner of a room containing administrative offices, a table, and a cupboard. From the vantage point of this modest cranny, the cell’s bureau was only too aware of the challenges it faced. Its main powers lay in selecting students as factory agitators for the Moscow Party Committee, and in this it was sometimes bypassed by the university administration.14 In the next several years, however, the bureau of the party cell established itself as the single most powerful organization at the university with the exception of the rector’s office, with which it successfully crossed swords.
The Bolshevik network of cells, which before 1917 were sometimes also known as “groups” or “circles,” had frequently expanded into party town committees after October. In 1918 much organization work focused on creating as many new cells as possible. Cell secretaries emerged as a crucial political stratum as the Party pursued the slogan first invented by the Novgorod provincial committee in 1918: “total centralization” of party life. The strong secretary controlling the cell agenda, and the docile cell members willing to ratify the proposals presented by higher authority, became stock figures in party debates over the inner-party regime. Protesting the subordinate status of the cell rank and file became a plank in the platforms of successive inner-party opposition groups.15
University cells, however, consolidated a more activist and far more powerful position typical of communist factions in nonparty institutions. In the old universities, where Communists were a small minority of the students and a tiny fraction of the faculty, cells became the beachhead of pro-Bolshevik activity and local executors of party-state strategy toward the higher school. At the communist university, however, the initial position of the cell was more precarious. There was no reason for higher authorities to rely overly on the cell; the bias from the first was in favor of the rector, always a high-ranking Communist appointed by the Central Committee. In the early 1920s the cell built up its position with the Moscow Party Committee by providing badly needed teachers and propagandists, but this gave the cell leadership only a little more leverage.16
The Sverdlov cell had to win its position, and thus the cell leadership and the rank and file had a common cause even as the bureau consolidated power over its charges. The cell bureau was charged with organizing the party obligations and political life of its members, which at Sverdlov, of course, meant the entire student body. Its bureau was thus in a good strategic position to increase its power, especially since the school’s soviet, officially authorized to run all university affairs not specifically party-related, in practice dealt with administrative matters of the most innocuous kind. The cell’s bureau, in contrast, acquired the power to recommend a student’s dismissal from the university or even expulsion from the Party, to promote candidate party members to full members, to run school publications, and organize al1 the obligatory party meetings, holidays, and information sessions.17
The bureau’s bid for a dominant role put it on a collision course with the one-man management of the rector. Serious conflicts between the cell bureau and the rector occurred during Nevskii’s tenure in 1921. In a report to a Central Committee commission examining the university, the bureau complained of disorganized classes, lack of qualified teachers, and failure on the part of the administration to help the bureau raise students’ political consciousness. The bureau tried to enhance the sense of scandal by reporting cases of student kruzhki discussing issues of freedom of speech instead of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Nevskii defensively rejected most of the students’ complaints, but in front of Udal’tsov, the Central Committee representative on the commission, he announced his resignation.18
What reversed the balance of power between rector and bureau—and this phenomenon became inherent in the dynamics of the party hierarchy—was an oppositionist association that suddenly destroyed the rector. According to Nevskii’s replacement, Vladimir Petrovich Antonov-Saratovskii, his predecessor had supported the Workers’ Opposition along with several senior university administrators. According to Antonov, the Central Committee suggested that Nevskii step down.19 In this top-heavy yet volatile mass party, if the local potentate fell the whole power structure could be momentarily inverted.
Antonov’s new administration, however, coming in on the heels of Nevskii’s collapse, was regarded with great suspicion during the following year. “As soon as I arrived at the University,” Antonov recalled, “the students regarded me as a gendarme from the Central Committee.” The rise of the Sverdlov cell was decisively furthered in the 1922–23 battle with the new rector Antonov-Saratovskii, who was effectively defeated and dismissed from his post.20
The turn to the NEP order had brought the task of training the young generation to the forefront of the party agenda, but simultaneously heightened alarmist warnings that youth would be led astray. Youth, so often the constituency of revolution, became a topic obsessively discussed after 1917. The Bolshevik Party itself had always been primarily “a party of young men."21 The preoccupation with youth, fueled so much by revolution and Bolshevism, can also be related to such diverse underlying developments as the creation of a period of extended youth as a product of urban social life, the European-wide discovery of adolescence, and the stress on youthful innovation as part of what has been called a “modernizing consciousness.” Yet the extraordinary significance youth assumed in the 1920s revolved around two particularly Soviet perceptions: its absolute importance for the future society and its special vulnerability to diversion from the true path. Early Soviet approaches to youth were permeated by the belief in its simultaneous malleability and corruptibility.22
The special position of the student as both the promise of the future and the object of special protection reflected these two sides to early Soviet conceptions of youth, and this in turn permeated issues of education. Soon after party students began to devote themselves to long-term higher education, in 1922, the wide-ranging dangers of “academicism” or “scholasticism” were raised in central publications. These terms were centered around condemning bookish, cerebral values that overcame social, political, or revolutionary commitment. Yet the class and anti-intellectual connotations linked them to broader fears about the potential de-classing of proletarian youth. The specter of deproletarianization was a kind of Pandora’s Box: it was as if the party member who discarded the hammer to open a book released a swarm of nonproletarian ills. As it most directly affected Sverdlov University, this discussion underlined the dangers for party students and raised sweeping allegations of loose sexual morals, “scholasticism,” and ideological deviations. Since these charges threatened their party and class credentials, however, Sverdlovians hotly denied them.23 At this sensitive moment, the rector, instead of defending the students, responded by giving the allegations more credence. Antonov, after secretly investigating reports of prostitution in the dormitories, unexpectedly issued a draconian ordinance (the infamous Decree No. 253) governing the behavior of the communist students, ostensibly to shield them against drunkenness, card games, and prostitutes. The incident at once raised issues of the rector’s power, the students’ class purity, and sensational allegations about students’ degenerate lifestyle. A political firestorm was unleashed.24
“Mentioning such phenomena in the rector’s decree discredits the title of student at a communist university,” the cell bureau raged. “It is a bureaucratic, officious production by people who are not acquainted with the everyday life of the students.” Student after student attacked the fact that Antonov had bypassed the party cell and treated the Sverdlovians not as seasoned revolutionaries but as schoolchildren. The rector, the bureau concluded, retained no authority among students: “He is permanently discredited in their eyes.” Five weeks after the bureau petitioned the Central Committee for Antonov’s resignation, Glavpolitprosvet issued the order for the rector to step down.25
The high-level commission set up in late December 1922 to investigate the incident, which included top Agitprop and TsKK officials Bubnov and Sol’ts, identified the political dimension behind the student indignation. Antonov spent most of his deposition criticizing a group of “power-seekers” (vlastniki) among the party cell leaders, many of whom had held party posts during the civil war. The ex-rector charged that these power-seekers viewed the cell’s relation to the administration as analogous to a party committee’s command over a soviet. These students, Antonov stated earlier in a separate report to the Central Committee, had connections in the local raikom and Moscow Party Committee, so the cell “line” was always approved. At his deposition, Antonov claimed this very report had been known only to three people in the Central Committee, but had been immediately leaked to the cell bureau.26
In the heat of political controversy, it was typical that the dismissed rector raised all the possible sins, from political oppositionism to sexual libertinism, that could discredit the students’ position. He pointed to a group of followers of Bogdanov in the academically advanced “lecturer group” and mentioned theft of lightbulbs and other state property. The rector portrayed the threat of sexual promiscuity as so serious that he had had to hire elderly cleaning women for the dormitories. The cell leaders responded by depicting Antonov as high-handed dictator, and they played down his charges as a few unfortunate incidents.27
The student leader Struev raised the issue of inner-party democracy—the theme that resurfaces in all discussions of party cell relations between rector, bureau, and rank and file—by charging that Antonov feared democratic input from his subordinates. Every Sverdlov student interviewed by the commission denied the existence of so-called power-seekers. “There are several comrades who believe the presidium of the university must reckon with the decisions of the bureau of the cell on certain questions,” one student put it, “and in fact such an opinion is virtually universal.”28 The clash over power and byt had altered the political order at the university: the bureau had helped depose a rector who had bypassed the party cell.
The dispute over the rector’s dominance carried over into the codification of new charters for communist universities, which were prepared in 1922 after the first Soviet-era charters were imposed on the old universities. Antonov put out a draft for Sverdlov University, but Agit-prop’s Popov rejected it on the grounds that it placed too little power in the hands of top university administrators. It was typical that Popov capitalized on the struggle with the nonparty professoriat to affect inner-party policies; he decried any decentralization of power as a heretical endorsement of liberal “academic freedom.” The Sverdlov cell bureau, however, protested even Antonov’s draft as an attempt to permanently subordinate the cell to the administration. Despite the discontent, a new charter for communist universities was approved in 1923 which gave the rector the final say on all major questions. Student protests took on overtones of a general inner-party critique.29 Echoing earlier opposition groups, like the Democratic Centralists, which had most consistently opposed “military methods” in the Party toward the end of the civil war, a lead editorial in the journal Sverdlovets sharply noted that in the new charter the rector stood above the cell like military committees in the civil war stood over Red Army cells: “The Soviet plays the role of the Bulygin Duma. The rector is everything. What reigns is not the principle of party dictatorship, but one-man dictatorship. In our opinion, what is good for the Red Army or industrial enterprises is dangerous for an organization like a communist university.”30
The “party discussion” that brought the supporters of Trotskii into open confrontation with the party majority at the end of 1923 brought out several planks in the new opposition’s platforms that directly concerned the position of the rank and file. Although Trotskii had been among the most militant centralizers but a short while before, Trotskyist platforms now called for regular elections to high-level posts and more powers to party cells. The oppositionist majority in the Sverdlov party organization, a rarity in the Party which led to major institutional restructuring in 1924, was linked to the broad political struggle the cell had been waging. Sverdlovians found it eminently possible to believe that more power to lower-level party organizations—that is, to the Sverdlov cell—was the main prerequisite for “internal-party democracy.” In December of 1923 virtually all the Sverdlov student kruzhki were, judging by bureau reports, in some way critical of the official Central Cornmittee positions on internal party matters; virtually all demanded reelections of the party apparatus “from top to bottom.”31
The new rector, Martyn Nikolaevich Liadov (1872–1947), had been a founding member of Left Bolshevism around the time of the Capri School and had been associated with Georgian Menshevism during the civil war. Perhaps in part because of his own “deviationist” past, as rector and prominent historian of the Party Liadov maintained a vociferously orthodox stance throughout the inner-party struggles until the late 1920s. He conceived his major goals, aside from the liquidation of all deviations, as proletarianizing the student body and restructuring the curriculum of the communist university to make it more useful to the Party.32
Liadov’s total support for the Central Cornmittee majority and attempts to shut off further discussion at the university in 1923–24 led to even more tensions with student leaders. He was denounced in the cell for “factionalism” when he gathered Central Committee supporters from the students in his office to plan strategy. At the height of the opposition’s success at the university—when students denied the Party’s top leader Zinov’ ev the floor at a cell assembly until Preobrazhenskii could be summoned for a rebuttal—Liadov attempted to exploit this “demonstration against the Central Committee” to prevent further discussion of party “disagreements.” This time he was simply disregarded by the cell.33 Throughout, the cell rank and file and bureau members had united in a struggle against the rector and had equated improvement of the inner-party regime with acquisition of more power by the party cell.
In 1924, however, the back of the university opposition was broken. The 1924 purge decimated the ranks of the Sverdlov students; party cell politics was put on a new footing. Liadov helped found a new power structure in which he himself entered a newly created presidium of the bureau.34 With the rector now personally leading the cell as a bastion of party orthodoxy, and student politicians now anxious to erase the stigma of the university’s oppositionist reputation, student resentment was redirected. Rank-and-file students now protested against the heavy-handed methods of the bureau and invoked the ideal of inner-party democracy against the student leaders. Protests at a party meeting in 1926 exemplified the reorientation: “The atmosphere in our cell is stifling and unhealthy. Onotskii [the cell secretary] brings in command methods [elementy komandovanii] to the concept of internal party democracy. . . . Onotskii looks for enemies of the party where they don’t exist.” Another added: “He who criticizes the work of the cell bureau is now an oppositionist.” A third opined that it was necessary to be “critical” within the allowences of the Party, and that Marx himself said one must be critical. Liadov dismissed them all as “political youngsters.” “Six years ago,” he said, “anyone who wanted could come to the university and open up a discussion. This will happen no more . . . now we have the cell bureau.”35
The bureau, as the rector implied, had now become the administrative center of political power at the university. In September 1925 the rector and vice-rector (prorektor) were brought in as members to the presidium of the bureau and supported the reelection of the same cell secretary who had presided over the repressions of 1924. Critics among the older students wanted to replace this candidate, as he himself acknowledged; he characterized their “discontent” as the desire for “broad democracy” (shirokaia demokratiia). A second-year student explained: “The question is not in the [party] line but in methods.” Uglanov, the head of the Moscow party organization and a pillar of the entrenched hierarchical order that prevailed in the most important party committee during NEP, made a personal appearance at the university to propound a kind of managerial definition of “Bolshevik democracy”: “People spoke here about democracy, but what is the essence of Bolshevik democracy? To pose political questions at the right time. To correctly choose workers to enact the political line; to collectively enact the general line . . . this is democracy. . . . It is important to us [the MK] that comrades come out of the university with a correct idea about democracy.”36
The thrust of party cell politics had changed dramatically between the early and mid-1920s. The realignment after the suppression of the opposition in 1924 had polarized the students into a cell leadership and a rank and file. The participatory ideal raised by Sverdlovians now centered, not on greater power for the cell as a whole, but greater power for the communist students against a repressive cell leadership in alliance with the rector.
In this realignment the bureau profited from an institutionalized position of control over the lifestyle of its wards, the rank and file. This position grew out of the hierarchical inner-party regime that by the end of the civil war had placed a premium on cell secretaries guarranteeing ratification of a predetermined agenda at cell meetings; the power of the cell leadership was enhanced by its function of monitoring and evaluating all cell members. At Sverdlov, a network of cell organizers presented the bureau with reports on student groups and individuals. With disciplinary functions in the hands of the cell leadership, the bureau helped identify punishable behavior. Reports from 1922, for example, criticized students suffering from “academicism.” Another report indicted a comrade Erman for uncomradely relations with female students: epitomizing the single most widespread complaint among female Communists about their male comrades, he saw in them “only a woman, in the oldest sense of the word.” A third referred to “abnormalities” in student ethics, including possessiveness towards property and theft.37
The cell bureau in its evaluations strove to label the sociopolitical essence of the person. Mentality was explained by class affiliation; or, as in the case of purveyors of “intelligentsia psychology” or “petty-bourgeois individualism,” was it the other way around? What made the new classification schemes impossible to dismiss was their power to exclude students from the university.38
The formal disciplinary powers of the bureau, spanning political activity and everyday life, were codified in the party court the bureau ran. In the 1921 charter of what is called the “disciplinary court,” this body was authorized to judge violations in the dorms, academic infractions, and actions unbecoming a student at a communist university. This court, later referred to as the “comrades” or “party court,” was a party organization not formally bound by Soviet jurisprudence (although the format of testimony and calling witnesses was observed). One of the five members of the court, elected by a student meeting, acted as prosecutor in each case and was responsible for gathering evidence.39 The comrades courts of trade unions were designed, with dubious success, to bolster work discipline, but were phased out in 1922 after administrative personnel began to be “indicted” as well. Higher educational tribunals persisted, however, as forums for evaluation of student lifestyle.40 At Sverdlov the court bridged the realms of politics and behavior with a rough and ready justice. In 1922 Sverdlov party organizer Gurnov was suspended from the Communist Party for a year for the theft of butter from the university kitchen after a fellow kruzhok member informed on him; but the court also considered a case against students who defended freedoms of speech and press in a university discussion.41 The power invested in the cell leadership to judge and discipline its members made the evaluation of everyday life a form of combined political and social control. Yet the politics of lifestyle became something broader than the prerogatives of the local leadership. Just as censorship inspires but often becomes less pervasive than self-censorship, the effort to elaborate revolutionary and communist standards of behavior blossomed into a vast party project of self-regulation and self-control.
Byt: Ethics, Behavior, Deviation
Byt, which moved to the center of the Bolshevik movement in the 1920s, can only somewhat inadequately be translated as everyday life or lifestyle. It also carried the connotation of way of life, mores, and existence. Intense concern with conduct and behavior, often combined with explicit moralism about issues like sobriety and punctuality, had from the first been part both of student corporatism and the workers’ movement.42 But the central place byt assumed in Bolshevism, and in the communist student movement in particular in the 1920s, can be attributed to a number of new developments. A preoccupation with the “revolutionary everyday” came to the fore as a way of transforming the NEP “retreat” into a cultural advance, as the opening manifesto of a major youth journal declared.43 Most important, creating a new byt for the first time became intimately associated with seemingly realizable potentialities of forging a new order on a society-wide scale. Byt came to be seen as the stuff of which the New Soviet Man would be made.
This was therefore the realm in which abstract party and revolutionary values—whether collectivism, revolutionary engagement, or political loyalty—could be identified in the here and now. Lifestyle and habits marked one’s relationship to the revolution. After Nevskii was transferred from the rectorship of Sverdlov to run the Lenin Library, Communists there railed to him against the “old professor” employees who kissed women’s hands and eschewed the word “comrade.” Such “abnormal” old habits, not corresponding with “Soviet byt,” were used as arguments for their dismissal.44 Byt served as a badge of political affiliation, staking out the boundaries of revolutionary and reactionary.
The agony of the 1920s debate about the proper communist way of life, however, was that the revolutionary camp, which had embraced in a Manichaean way the motto tertium non datur, remained intractably divided when it came to fully mapping out those boundaries. This was sensed by the conservative professor Got’e, who in his diary referred to the Bolsheviks as gorillas and dogs, when he exclaimed with a mixture of sarcasm and astonishment: “‘They’ are full of bourgeois prejudices. . . . Pokrovskii is celebrating his twenty-fifth scholarly jubilee. This alone is a bourgeois prejudice!”45 From the Left, even more condemnation was heaped on the party leadership by militant iconoclasts for concessions to old ways. A manifesto of a “group for communist byt” which circulated in the universities in the mid-1920s declared the Soviet order the product of its intelligentsia party rulers, who had ceased to be revolutionaries. The only remedy was to rear true and uncontaminated communists from childhood.46
A primary realm of contestation within the party camp in the early 1920s over the communist way of life revolved around the development of a Bolshevik ethics and morality. On the one hand, the radical student rejection of the very concept of morality, drawing on materialist philosophical currents, was well known and, indeed, often exaggerated. Aikhenval’d noted: “Try telling a Sverdlov student that he is a type of moral person. After a humorous and disdainful look you will be bombarded with the most serious proof that morality is withering away, that one must discard the term, that under communism there will be no morality, that Marx said this in one place, Kautsky that in another, and Darwin this in a third.”47
It would have been more difficult, on the other hand, for such a student to invoke an even more relevant authority: Lenin. In his most famous pronouncement on issues of byt at the Third Komsomol Congress of 1920, cited constantly in the decade that followed, Lenin explicitly opposed any youthful repudiation of the concept of communist ethics. Lenin never doubted the necessity of morality for Communists; it was simply defined in terms of class and party. Morality was simply that which served to destroy the exploitative society and to aid the proletariat in building a new society of communists.48 Lenin’s acceptance of the concept of communist morality opened the door to further efforts to develop it in a Bolshevik framework.
But who would determine what served the interests of the new society? Lenin’s formulation, it could hardly fail to be observed, privileged the Party in determining what was moral. Others left this central issue further in the background. Yet all new Bolshevik formulations of morality involved placing the interests of collectivities—class, party, revolution, regime—over the individual, and most revolved around determining rules of conduct. The Bolshevik feminist and Workers’ Opposition leader Aleksandra Kollontai, far from subverting the dominant definitions, defined morality as “rules by which to live.” Their final form would simply emerge with the new social order; yet communist morality was nonetheless those rules cemented by the “working class collective,” not the individual. And the “basic rule of life for the Communist,” she concluded, is that “private life” (lichnaia zhizn’) cannot be separated from the collective.49
A major impetus behind the articulation of a communist lifestyle in the early Soviet period was thus concern with the principles that were to govern a behavioral code for party members. Even if the notion of morality itself was divisive, therefore, implicitly moralistic injunction was ubiquitous.50 The urge to prescribe an official code of revolutionary behavior can be traced to a party consideration of ethics during a time of civil war scarcity, state allocation of resources, and hunger. A. A. Sol’ts, a high figure in the TsKK, noted that discussions of revolutionary ethics were characteristic of the other socialist parties, but “in the course of all its struggle, [the Bolshevik Party] never discussed this.” Sol’ts called the 1921 Party Conference the first official forum in which ethics as a topic was discussed.51 This recognition came out of the civil war experience, when questions of byt were inflammatory: some local party committees on their own initiative attempted to form “ethical commissions” that would determine such questions as how much food each party member should take. Party leaders, not surprisingly, preferred a more amorphous set of guidelines rather than a constricting code that might be turned against the leadership itself. “We said, down with all sorts of ethical commissions, what is needed is an active proletarian sense.”52
Efforts to define revolutionary conduct in the name of collectivism and proletarian values in a time of near starvation helps explain how the emerging discussion of byt revolved around revolutionary asceticism, fears of “social corruption,” and an obsession with purity and self-denia1.53 Such core concerns were accentuated with the mass influx of new members into the Party and the vices, luxuries, and temptations perceived in the shift to the NEP economy. New demands from within the TsKK itself surfaced in the early 1920s to ratify a “code of communist behavior,” and a commission including Iaroslavskii, Krupskaia and Sol’ts was actually formed to consider the question.54 Since conflicting currents of iconoclasm and anti-iconoclasm rendered a positive definition of revolutionary lifestyle elusive, the association of NEP with a crisis of corrupting influences helped to further constitute communist behavior in terms of rejection of dangerous or stigmatized social phenonomena. The term “Nepification” (onepivanie) was commonly used in discussions of byt to refer not only to the influence of Nepmen, the former exploiting classes, kulaks, and even noncommunist wives of party members, but to moral degeneration resulting from the restaurants and cabarets that flourished with NEP. The phrase “NEP in the state university” was coined by one activist to refer to the balls, dances, and other entertainment that became possible in the more prosperous 1920s; he called for the liquidation of such “disgusting offspring of NEP” and the establishment of “control of proletarian organizations over all concerts and events.”55
This Bolshevik puritanism was not simply the affair of student militants and party moralists. The concern with the appearance of proletarian purity determined even the face the new regime revealed to the outside world. In 1926 the Worker-Peasant Inspectorate drafted rules approved by the Politburo that forbade Soviet diplomats in bourgeois countries to don “special clothing,” display expensive dishware, or exhibit more than “maximal modesty” at receptions. Typical was not just the implied connection between asceticism and class purity but the open threat of disciplinary reprisal: violators would be held “strictly accountable.”56
The intimate identification of NEP with moral and class degeneracy in byt was paralleled by warnings, to which Nevskii joined his voice, that NEP opened the door to bourgeois restoration in all other parts of the societal “superstructure” from science to art to ideology. Far more than the well-ordered policy shift pictured in political commentary, “NEP” in the party imagination thus became a complex of insidious threats from class aliens and a barrage of images of moral corruption. As Selishchev’s sociolinguistic study of revolutionary terminology laconically notes in a section on word changes, the term NEP lost its primary meaning of New Economic Policy and became semantically synonymous with “new bourgeois strata,” speculation, and Nepmanism. This explains Zinov' ev’s extraordinary plea in his report of the Central Committee to the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923: “We have to separate the terms “NEP” and the “New Economic Policy.” You undoubtedly catch yourselves, when you say NEP, painting a picture of the Nepman and his unpleasant traits. We often use the phrase ‘a victory over NEP.’ . . . This happens because we mix up NEP with the Nepman.”57
The NEP economy and the party hierarchy, however, only increased blatant disparities in standards of living and the potential for officials to acquire privileges. The Bolsheviks were charged with betrayal of the revolution by a wide array of critics and faced the fear of corruption within.58 The pervasive concern with purity in a time of retreat from egalitarianism made byt into an explosive political weapon; it became imperative for party organs to assert primacy over the evaluation of communist conduct. Newly created party control commissions recast the discussion of ethics to propagate the axiom, so ubiquitous in official pronouncements about byt in the 1920s, that “the interests of party, of class stand above everything.” The groping to codify correct communist behavior was in this way transmuted into a demand for obedience sanctioned in the name of morality.59 This, as the party disciplinarians would have readily recognized, was a fundamentally political act.
The discussion of morality and behavior within the context of NEP comprised just one facet of the broader enterprise of conceiving a new byt. A modernizing notion of a more advanced way of life also became part and parcel of the concept of cultural revolution; the introduction of better habits, according to many party intellectuals, carried the connotation of remolding “backward” cultural norms. “What does cultural revolution mean?” Bukharin, for example, expressed it. “It means change in the characteristics of people, in their habits, in their feelings and desires, their manner of life, their byt.” Trotskii’s immensely popular 1923 Questions of Byt linked high standards of personal behavior with the acquisition of culture and equated this with the most significant revolutionary tasks. “We need to learn how to work well: precisely, cleanly, economically,” Trotskii enjoined. “We need culture in work, culture in life, culture in byt.” For Trotskii, and for many other Communists, proper hygiene, the vodka question, and the “struggle for cultured speech” were transformed in this period, at least rhetorically, into the paramount tasks of the Revolution.60
The striving for a communist uniformity in the realm of byt splintered, however, in part along the lines of many of its subcultures. To a significant wing of the Party, less vocal in published discussions about byt and disdainful of the theoreticians and intellectuals, the stress on “culture in byt” and the respectability implied in the official moralism contradicted the Party’s proletarian character. The term zaezzhatel’stvo (roughly meaning “going overboard”) was coined to describe Bolsheviks who reveled in vulgar, tough speech and stereotypically proletarian behavior. Stalin’s 1925 deflection of Lenin’s damaging testament—“Stalin is too crude”—referred to these values and might be taken as a sign of their potency. “Yes, comrades, I am a direct and crude person, that is true, I do not reject it.”61
Even as the notion of a uniform communist byt remained a ideal construct as elusive as party monolithism itself, the debate helped expand the conception of the cultural realm to encompass manners, dress, language, sexuality, and indeed all aspects of behavior. Instead of comprising a private or traditional realm—now linked either to bourgeois individualism or to backwardness—all these areas merged into the broader political and revolutionary agenda. The long-term effect was to justify an attempt at wholesale reconstruction of traditional cultures, especially by 1928 when cultural revolution was increasingly recast as armed assault. For example, in that year a lead editorial in the journal Revoliutsiia i kul'tura made the claim: “The militant socialist reeducation of the consciousness and work habits and byt of the masses represents one of the forms of class struggle.” In a discussion the same year linking bohemianism among students to sexual deviance, gypsies, and decadence, the Old Bolshevik scholar of religion and psychology, Mikhail Reisner – himself the son of a Baltic nobleman who as a young man had immersed himself in Tolstoyan philosophy—remarked that the easiest way to deal with the idle intelligentsia might be to put them in “concentration camps.”62
While control commissions and party leaders emphasized loyalty to the Party in discussion of byt, debates in communist student publications revolved more around the proper understanding of collectivism. The interests of the Party and those of the collective, however, could hardly be disengaged. As it had been for decades within the radical intelligentsia, collectivism was understood in its most general sense as devotion to the common interest above the personal, almost always to the point of self-denial. In the 1920s, however, collectivism also acquired a series of more immediate connotations and even obligations for party students. It implied certain living arrangements, social or educational work (most often carried out through the party cell), and commitment to current affairs above one’s studies or career.63
It was possible, to be sure, to question whether the mere fulfillment of quasi-official obligations represented true collectivism. A storm of letters was provoked when a student’s missive published in a Leningrad student newspaper decried precisely the lack of civic values (obshchestvennost') in the “useless meetings, uncounted hours of gabbing, mechanical ticking off of various obligations, registrations and re-registrations.” A central publication soon found an explanation for such sweeping criticisms of Soviet life: the student, Iurov, had consorted with prostitutes and contemplated suicide. But what the commentator found even more insidious was a pervasive party attitude about prostitutes and drunkenness: “There’s no big sin here; the main thing is not to make noise.” The debate about byt, it can be inferred from such exposés, had became simultaneously a part of political life, an attempt to overcome resistance to model codes of behavior, yet also an effort at self-regulation of conduct.64
A feuilleton in the newspaper Sverdloviia demonstrates the attempt to impart social and political obligations through a stereotypical portrait of a collectivist and an individualist. It contrasts two Sverdlov students, comrade “Partiitsev” (party member) and comrade “Knizhnikov” (bookworm), one who conscientiously fulfills his social work outside the university, the other who talks over the heads of the sailors he is assigned to teach. The party-minded one is neat, precise, busy; he uses his time on the tram to compose an article on the peasant question; the bookworm cares only about his studies and is a deviationist (an Enchmenist) to boot. The piece closes as the individualist curses the bureau of the Sverdlov party cell.65
In the day-to-day political affairs of Sverdlov University, the necessity of representing everyday behavior in sweeping socio-ideological terms was obligatory. Petty-bourgeois individualism, for example, was a common and sufficient ground for purge. In the political rough-and-tumble one person’s proletarian collectivist could very well become another’s pernicious individualist; yet this only served to make evaluations of byt even more integral to the everyday political struggle. A purged Sverdlov student petitioned: “In the decision [of the purge commission] the manifestation of ‘individualism’ on my part is discussed. I have not displayed such traits and in the decision not one concrete anticommunist act is brought to bear.”66 Especially interesting here is the interchangeability of individualism and anticommunism. A disciplinary system in which individualist traits could be equated with political treason created a powerful mechanism for the punishment of nonconformity.
In early Soviet visions of the path to the collectivist future, to be sure, the ultimate place of the individual remained under dispute. The Taylorist techno-utopia of Gastev, for example, seemed to welcome the advent of anonymous, standardized, machine-like “proletarian units”; Bogdanov replied that comradely cooperation really meant elimination of all subordination and for the first time realization of full individuality. Some literary voices openly defended the personal from politics; the cost of attacking the private realm in the name of the collective forms the subject of a 1927 short story by Panteleimon Romanov, “Trial of a Pioneer.” The young pioneer Andrei Chuganov is followed and caught by his comrades reading poetry to a girlfriend, tried and convicted for subverting the collective, disrupting the training of “soldiers of the revolution,” and refusing to reveal the contents of the poems.67
An anti-private egalitarianism was at the heart of one of the most ambitious postrevolutionary attempts to put into practice new principles of byt: the organization of communes. Here, students also led the way. Communalism, of course, often made a virtue of necessity, since it reduced food costs, shared insufficient housing, and facilitated cultural activities. But a passionate faith in the promise of collectivism pervaded the commune movement, to the point where some communes insisted on sharing of all space and possessions, including underwear. Disagreements flared over how far to restrict “personal life,” whether familial or sexual ties were permissible within the communes and whether children should belong to parents. The strains this put on communes could become overwhelming, and many of the experiments were short-lived.68
The model of the kommuna, which in varying degrees eliminated all personal property and possessions, to many became associated with communism itself. The commune movement in early Soviet society could not but intersect with the regime’s own claims on collectivism. Local Narkompros branches, for example, supervised a network of communes, and each was attached to a “Soviet institution” where many commune members found work. Each commune member had to pledge a kind of oath upon entrance. An example of this pledge affirmed that communards could express their opinions before a collective decision, but afterward must subordinate themselves to that decision—a formula based on the Party’s doctrine of democratic centralism. The pledge closed with the statement: “I recognize that to build a [new] life through communes is possible only under the Soviet political system.” When urban Communists were unleashed on the countryside in the 1929–30 collectivization drive, the kommuna model provided widespread justification for seizure of peasant possessions, from pigs and chickens to the clothes off kolkhozniks’ backs.69
Sverdlov students initially were scattered in housing around Moscow, and lack of dormitory space was so acute that many camped in groups of ten to fifteen in the university’s larger classrooms. But the acquisition of dormitory space by the mid-1920s also resulted in the establishment of the Sverdlov University commune, which as a student commune attached to an educational institution was hardly unique. The M. N. Liadov commune—named after the rector who took such a strong interest in byt—was dedicated, according to its charter, to “raising its members in a collectivist spirit” and prosecuting the struggle against “all petty-bourgeois, philistine-individualist holdovers.” Living arrangements were tied to political life through an extension of the party cell bureau’s lines of authority. The commune’s elected president sat on the cell bureau, which closely observed the affairs of the commune. In the dormitories that housed the commune, student leaders (starosti) monitored the activities, conflicts, and infractions of student members and reported to the party cell.70
An overriding concern united all these areas in the search for a new communist way of life, from the elaboration of communist ethics, to the grappling with the corruption of NEP, to the regulation of values through collectivism. Discussion in all these realms was drawn toward condemning deviance. The most far-reaching significance of what one might call the politics of everyday life—and the area in which the search for a new byt was integrated into the Bolshevik polity most profoundly—is that the most petty infraction could be linked to deviation in a political culture that set Manichaean distinctions between correct and incorrect, healthy and degenerate, orthodox and deviationist. The lengthy list of deviations of student byt—bohemianism, hooliganism, sexual libertinism, philistinism, individualism, Enchmenism, Mininism, Eseninshchina, etc.71—were all precisely “-isms,” deviations from an imagined norm. The entire rogue’s gallery was united under the overarching term “degenerate” (upadochnyi, which can also be translated as “decadent” or “defeatist”).72 Degeneracy in its early Soviet usages had connotations embracing all behavior associated with individualism and alien classes. As in political or ideological deviation, one false move carried with it the danger of “infection” from the entire “disease.” One prominent discussion of petty-bourgeois influences among youth cast the oft-discussed “epidemic” of youth suicide as pure degeneracy, the highest stage into which all its manifestations could grow.73
The “sexual question” (polovoi vopros) was couched in shocking metaphors of purity and depravity and clearly attracted the most intense interest in the student discussion of byt. Malashkin’s Luna s pravoi storony—one of the major literary works that became a focus of the debate on youth morals, and one set at Sverdlov University—adroitly inserted vivid depictions of sexual promiscuity by using it as a metaphor for ideological deviation. The Komsomol member Tania Aristarkhovaia, whose poor peasant background is of course a symbol of sexual innocence, comes to Sverdlov University and falls under the influence of Trotskyist deviationists. The leading Trotskyist, the free-love advocate Isaika Chuzhachok (a name derived from chuzhoi, or alien) is depicted as a degenerate Jewish dandy from Poltava. Tania inevitably is infected by the degeneracy of her milieu: she takes twenty-two lovers and becomes a frequent user of alcohol, hashish, and other narcotics, as well as a participant in the “Athenian nights,” or orgies, that were supposedly common among the amoral students.74 In this fictional Sverdlov University, sexual and ideological deviance were one.
For all the lurid images of a degenerate studenchestvo, both high-ranking party moralists, party students, and experts participating in the debate shared a prurient stress on sexual sublimation and denial.75 While the scientism and materialism of the age on the one hand opened up the discussion, too great a preoccupation with sexual matters was painted among all three groups as the inward-looking individualism of a “parasitic element.” The perpetuation of the professionals’ theory that sex wasted energy at expense of the nation, advanced in the social criticism of physicians after 1905, was now, mutatis mutandis, upheld to conserve collectivist energy for the good of socialismo Typically, Iaroslavskii cast the very act of paying too much attention to the sexual question as a sign of degeneracy.76 A chorus of voices thus cast self-abnegation as the most positive of social and political acts.
Student sex surveys in prewar Russia had provided a scientific justification for theories positing that the revolutionary sublimation of sexual energy during the Revolution of 1905 had given way to post-1907 decadent introspection. Now, Sverdlov University provided a focal point for the statistical representation of postrevolutionary student mores. The 1923 Sverdlov survey, drawing on data from 1,615 students, provided grist for the conflicting fears and hopes invested in the new student body. On the one hand, indications that 45 percent of students practiced masturbation fueled the identification of students with degeneracy. Yet 85.7 percent of the Sverdlovians, when asked, came out for monogamous relationships. Some commentators used this to justify a proletarian patriotism that declared the new students more moral than their vanquished bourgeois predecessors. It was in this context, as well, that a Sverdlovian echoing the broader party antipromiscuity campaign made the attempt to collectivize the sexual question by casting it as part of the class struggle: “It is imperative to liquidate that conception of the sexual question that views it as the personal affair of each person,” an interpretation of the survey results in the Sverdlov journal exhorted. One must adhere to the morals of one’s class—or else one becomes an “enemy of one’s own class.”77
A key figure linking the professional and party world in the discussion about communist students, morality, and sexuality was Aron Borisovich Zalkind. A Moscow psychoanalyst adhering to the Adlerian school before the Revolution, Zalkind’s speciality was listed in a directory of physicians in 1925 as psychopathology; he became a leading figure in the early Soviet study of children (the discipline of pedology) and among “Marxist pedagogues.” The communist studenchestvo became a special object of study; his conclusions in key ways reinforced party moralists and the party disciplinary regime. For example, Zalkind diagnosed higher incidences of psychological neuroses among party oppositionists, whom he alleged suffered from an excess of emotionalism (an association with hysteria and femininity). His recommended cure was “a strengthening of party reeducation.” His findings also fitted squarely into the chorus of professional and party voices calling for sexual sublimation for the good of the Revolution; his maxim was that “sexuality [polovoe] must be subordinated to class [klassovomu].”78
Yet the moralist in the party context in the 1920s who perhaps most vociferously linked political and personal deviations was none other than rector Liadov. His argumentation is significant on several counts. Liadov, again, traced the roots of all current ills to the “period of reaction” between 1907 and 1910, vividly contrasting the intelligentsia’s unnatural perversion with collectivist proletarian purity.79 This longstanding association of degeneracy with an epochal turn away from revolution by contrast equated revolutionary offensive with purification, a sweeping away of all the sickly contamination of NEP. Liadov also treated degeneracy as a master deviation that spanned withdrawal from social problems, cult of the ego, Nietzschean hero-worship, pornography, and hooliganism. He lumped these together as the ideology of the wavering, petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. At the start of NEP, this same intelligentsia, desiring money and material comforts, wormed its way into Soviet institutions, supported the changing landmarks movement (smenovekhovstvo), and Trotskii in 1923. Regardless of the period in which it appeared or its particular incarnation, then, degeneracy represented a devious infiltration of the enemy. Every step toward socialism, Liadov theorized, brings out a new form of degeneracy among this segment of the intelligentsia, which then infects the less firm. The resemblance of this argument to Stalin’s 1929 theoretical innovation famously justifying the Great Break—that the closer socialism approaches the more the class struggle is exacerbated—seems coincidental, as Liadov, as we shall see, himself ended up as associated with the “Right Deviation.”80 Yet the striking similarity reveals how closely the discussion of degeneracy was intimately related to that of political opposition.
If the imagery of sick deviance and healthy orthodoxy spanned the realms of politics and byt, the connections between political and lifestyle deviance were firmly anchored in the party-wide disciplinary regime that emerged after 1920. The party disciplinary organs, the control commissions set up in that year, were created to monitor both political deviations and infractions of communist byt; these functions were irrevocably intertwined in their activities. While the Cheka perhaps set the precedent with its mission to uncover crimes not only of counterrevolution but of speculation, the Ninth Party Conference of September 1920 marked a new phase in the organization of party discipline.
At this time the Central Control Commission (TsKK) was formed; and the Tenth Congress, in March 1921, established rules governing election of local control commissions, giving them powers to respond to complaints and initiate investigations. The Tenth Congress, as is well known, also passed two other resolutions on discipline, “On the Unity of the Party” and “On the Syndicalist and Anarchist Deviation in Our Party.” These documents authorized expulsion from the Party for factional activity. The TsKK, in 1920 headed by Dzerzhinskii, who was soon replaced by Iaroslavskii, was thus set up as part of the original mechanism designed to enforce the ban on factions. But one of the main rationales for its existence was the investigation and prosecution of all crimes “and other deeds” violating “communist ethics.” Sol’ts reported in 1921 that the new control commissions were attempting to try ethical infractions, such as acquisition of “personal comforts,” without excess legal formality.81
The TsKK in the 1920s emerged as a kind of inner-party political police, the main prosecutor of measures against the successive political oppositions. While at the Twelfth Party Congress the TsKK had nine members and a staff of 50, in 1923 it was combined with the Worker-Peasant Inspectorate (RKI) to yield a staff of 150. Iaroslavskii, as head of the TsKK, assumed the role not only of chief ideologist against the oppositions, but enforcer of all the party rules and regulations against them. This role was so notorious that an inflammatory poster at the United Opposition’s 1927 demonstrations on the tenth anniversary of October pictured Stalin as a gendarme holding an attack dog named Iaroslavskii by a leash. In 1926 the Mensheviks’ political commentator in Moscow charged: “Already there aren’t two Bolsheviks who will speak openly, tell one another about their doubts and so on. They fear the . . . TsKK, which has its eyes and ears everywhere.” In an implicit defense of the private sphere that drew applause from the Leningrad opposition, the oppositionist member of the TsKK, Bakaev, condemned the “unhealthy” growth of denunciations (donositel'stvo) to the organ that prevented “a friend from telling his friend a sincere thought.” Typically, Bakaev called for strict discipline and harsh punishment of this new sin—only now the deviation was denunciation itself.82
Local party committees organized their own control commissions, which were subordinated to the TsKK. All indications are that the bulk of these commissions’ work was related to issues of byt—drunkenness, petty corruption, and the like—which, in addition to other reasons, were considered political matters because they undermined the prestige and power of the Party. Infractions of “party discipline” were not only a standard topic in debates on party ethics, but were prosecutable by the control commissions as ethical violations. Discipline was thus cast as an ethical issue, byt as a political one. Sol'ts, in a report on party ethics at Sverdlov University, acknowledged that many control commission informants were motivated by political rivalries, although he made light of the often petty circumstances involved: “With us it is like this—you all, most likely, are aware of this—some comrades gather, get drunk together, and then one after the other go to complain at the c[ontrol] c[ommission]. They argue about who drank more, who drank less. . . . This can only happen because they want to put one another away.” The Old Bolshevik shrewdly concluded: “This has its source in a struggle for power.”83
The links between political and lifestyle deviation were not restricted to the discussions of byt; they were built into the structure of the party disciplinary regime. This explains how the language, concepts, and even specific transgressions that animated the discussion of degeneracy were mirrored in the struggle against political oppositions. Trotskii complained privately to Bukharin in 1926 that cell secretaries of the Moscow organization, in the midst of Uglanov’s fight against the opposition, spread the information that Trotskii only gave speeches for the bourgeoisie and reaped a profit from the ticket sales. The polemic against Trotskyism perhaps most widely distributed after 1924 was Semen Kanatchikov’s History of One Deviation, which by 1925 had gone through five editions. This work portrayed Trotskii in terms identical to those in the discussions about byt. Trotskii is described as an individualist, isolated from the masses, a carrier of “intelligentsia traits.” He rejects discipline, gathering around him loners (odinochki) prone to hysterical panic.84 Just as Trotskii’s criticisms of the party leadership in 1923 were attributed to pessimistic hysteria, so “degenerate moods” among youth were described as panicked pessimism. Such descriptions of deviance acquired force precisely because they functioned in both politics and everyday life, bringing out the despicable opposites of officially encouraged values such as optimism, loyalty, discipline, commitment, and, ultimately, conformity and obedience.
The circle between politics and byt is closed when it is recalled that the Trotskyist opposition received its main support from student youth; that for years students and intellectuals were stereotyped as carriers of all kinds of moral and political deviations; and that students were in fact removed from production, thus “declassed” and linked to the intelligentsia.85 The power of this cluster of ideas and images, grounded as they were in the emergent disciplinary regime, helped divert the search for liberation into a hunt for deviance.
Education and Authority: Ironies of
Pedagogical Reform
The civil war period placed heavy emphasis on short-term training revolving around the commissariats, but some compromise, as we have seen, was already made with general education and Marxist theory. In the years after the shift to the three-year program in 1920, two successive educational approaches at the party school came to define communist university education for the duration of the decade. As a reaction to the war communist effort, another major approach took shape: the dominant goals of the early 1920s became raising the general educational level and training “red scholars” with disciplinary specializations. As before, virtually every major party intellectual and politician taught or made an appearance at the university, not to mention nonparty guests such as the agronomist Chaianov.86
In 1924, after Lenin’s death and the university purge, Liadov and his administration mounted a concerted attack against the curriculum of 1921–23 as a part of the broader campaign against “scholasticism.” What emerged in 1924 was a general redefinition of the tasks of the higher party school. The dominant goal was no longer, as in 1921–23, to educate scholarly Marxists and specialists, but to produce well-rounded, politically literate party leaders. One result was that general education lost priority; for example, Russian language was taken off the study plans in 1924–25. Practical tasks were reemphasized, and partially as an antidote against future oppositions the new disciplines of Leninism and party history saturated the curriculum.87
Liadov articulated a well-defined agenda. He expressly rejected the ambition of making Sverdlov into a center of Marxist scholarship and called for the university to become more practical, more proletarian, and more useful to the Party. Yet Liadov and his ally Konstantin Popov of Agitprop both championed a definition of “practical” in education that was not transparent. On one level, they understood practical to mean a reworking of academic programs to give them a less abstract character and to ensure that courses in theory revolved around concrete and contemporary examples. But they also understood “practical” to mean standardizing the social sciences around core methodologies as expressed in two master disciplines, historical materialism and, after 1924, Leninism.88
Liadov’s new “practicality” thus still emphasized theory—it was just a simplified and more regimented theory. Instead of the emphasis on specialized scholarship supported by other Old Bolshevik intellectuals, which was most frequently tied to their own areas of expertise, Liadov wanted to codify the teaching into more easily absorbed postulates and make it relevant to party praktiki, not future Marxist scholars. Liadov, the champion of practicality, himself taught historical materialism.
The Second Conference of Communist Universities, following on the heels of the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924, passed a range of measures to futher proletarianize party institutions. Three years of “production” and party experience could be waived only by party committees nominating the candidate or for workers from the bench. Students should be older, more “proletarian” in terms of work experience, and higher in the party ranks.89 The 1924 shift in educational policy affected the composition of the Sverdlov student body.90 Liadov mounted an effort to influence the occupational background of working-class students as well. Before 1924, students classified as workers clearly included children of workers. In 1924, Liadov resolved that the university would become working-class “not in words, but in fact.” This increased the average age of the Sverdlovian: in 1922–23 68 percent were under twenty-five, but in 1927–28 this fell to 21 percent. An effort was launched to recruit “genuine industrial workers” from the metal, textile, and railroad industries.91 These priorities prevented Sverdlov University from achieving any significant increase in the number of female students” which fluctuated between 10 and 20 percent of the student body in the 1920s—somewhat higher than in the Party as a whole, but roughly half that of higher education.92
As opposed to his recruitment policies, the “new practicality” Liadov succeeded in imposing after 1924 had important opponents. For one thing, Liadov was challenged by many of the Sverdlov teachers who were committed to a more traditional brand of theoretical Marxism, who believed, for example, in a focus on the political economy of capitalism rather than beginning with the study of Soviet conditions. Some party administrators also disagreed with Liadov’s views; foremost among them Pokrovskii, who derided Liadov’s opposition to an academic focus. What occurred in the 1924 shift at Sverdlov, therefore, was that priorities were once again reshuffled—hardly in a neat or decisive manner—between general education, theory, and practical party training.93
In light of these 1924 changes geared at making Sverdlov more useful to the Party, it may seem paradoxical that this was also the year the boldest experiment of the 1920s in transforming pedagogy in higher education, the Dalton Plan, was officially adopted. Moreover, this plan was not put forward by Agitprop, the party leadership, or Liadov, but represented the pet project of the progressive party educators, among whom virtually the only politically important personage was Krupskaia.94 Yet the other great changes in the watershed of 1924 opened the door to this experiment as well.
The Dalton Plan, also known as the Laboratory Plan, originated in the enthusiasm for John Dewey’s pedagogical maxim of “learning by doing.” A follower of Dewey, Helen Parkhurst, developed the method in Dalton, Massachusetts. Originally designed for children under nine, the method called for each student to work out a “contract,” an educational program tailored to the needs of the individual. Regimented class hours were abolished and students were free to roam and fraternize with fellows of all ages; work took place in various “laboratories” with teachers trained in each subject. Between 1922 and 1933 Parkhurst’s book, Education on the Dalton Plan, was published in nineteen languages.95
In late 1922 Krupskaia, prompted by several considerations, gave highly favorable reviews of Parkhurst’s book. The “planned” nature of study was appealing, as was the emphasis on practical work and learning by doing. In addition, the plan would allow teachers to work with greater numbers of students and economize on textbooks. In 1923 the editorial board of Krupskaia’s pedagogical journal, Na putiakh k novoi shkole, championed the plan against its critics.96
As this method was being promoted in pedagogical circles, educators in the party schools were searching for new methods in higher education. The prerevolutionary universities were portrayed in the years after 1917 as bastions of professorial elitism, where students passively gazed at the podium and memorized abstruse lectures. Bolstering student “independence” and linking teaching to praxis were almost universally championed by educators after the Revolution. From 1921 to 1924 lectures were increasingly abandoned at Sverdlov in favor of seminars, known by the more revolutionary term kruzhki (study circles). In this period as well lectures were widely “discredited” among the communist students as authoritarian holdovers from bourgeois byt, and the party schools became the most eager advocates of pedagogical reform.97
At the same time, the mechanisms for curricular centralization were firmly put in place in party higher education. This can be attributed most of all to the activities of Agitprop and Glavpolitptosvet, successive congresses of soviet-party schools and communist universities, Central Committee directives, and distribution of standardized reading lists and study plans. By 1924 enough centralization had occurred that if a new methodology was endorsed, it could (at least on paper) be almost universally adopted in the party schools. The Third Congress of Soviet-Party Schools on 7–10 June 1924, again following the Thirteenth Party Congress, gave a detailed resolution supporting the Dalton Plan for the higher schools. In 1924–25 the Dalton Plan was introduced in almost all soviet-party schools and communist universities.98
Under the Dalton Plan as it was implemented at Sverdlov and elsewhere, the teacher led introductory lessons and helped formulate individual or group research assignments (often containing interdisciplinary “complexes” of themes). Then, the kruzhki met independently and with the teacher for the duration of the course. Paralleling the debates about “democracy” in the party cell, the method was designed to increase the activity (aktivnost’), independence (samodeiatel'nost'), and power of the students; paralleling the debates on byt, the method was proclaimed to promote collectivism and ties to production. “The role of the teacher changes dramatically,” one pedagogue wrote in a typical passage. “He no longer ‘teaches.’ . . . He is no longer a dictator. . . . Now he is simply an experienced person, a consultant, who helps the student in his independent work.” Education would no longer hand down received formulas; it would be a process of discovery. The classroom would be turned into a laboratory.99
As in the realm of byt, however, changes after 1924 were hardly the ones of which the party pedagogues dreamed. As one Dalton proponent lamented in 1926, “However strange it may seem, it is all the same certain that the highly energetic implementation of the Dalton Plan in all schools has not corresponded with movement forward in the application of contemporary and progressive teaching methods.”100
The new pedagogy, like communist standards of conduct, became a means of marking the revolutionary and reactionary—and loyalty and resistance to the Party. Just as byt was integrated into the Party’s disciplinary system, the regime’s surveillance organs used the new pedagogy as a benchmark in evaluating the professoriat. GPU reports, repeatedly expressing deep hostility toward the intelligentsia, noted opposition to the Dalton Plan in profiles of individual professors. A 1924 social evaluation (svodka) of the professoriat cited resistance to the new pedagogy as a clearly “counterrevolutionary phenomenon.” Standard secret police forms sent to the localities in this period often included sections for reports on the professoriat’s outlook on new methods of teaching.101
Indeed, by aiming at a replacement of the lecture system the Dalton Plan threatened professorial authority, and the new “active” methods provoked widespread opposition in the universities.102 For supporters among the pedagogues and in the communist universities, however, there were fundamental principles at stake: the ideal of student group initiative was one goal common to all the new methods and was eagerly embraced by Sverdlov students.103 Yet the end result, according to Ryndich, was only that students “are afraid of independence, they fear to make the slightest movement independently.”104
It was perfectly clear to leading party intellectuals that the principle of independent interpretation embodied in progressive teaching methods contradicted many aspects of Leninist theory and practice. Liadov, at one Sverdlov cell bureau meeting, openly announced that he had “always been very wary of the Dalton plan.”105 In a discussion of pedagogy in 1923 Pokrovskii told the Socialist Academy it was unfortunate that only American “bourgeois pedagogical literature” was so popular in Soviet Russia: “American methods consist of teaching everyone to pose questions and develop them independently. But I can imagine what would happen to our party discipline when every Komsomol member poses and solves these questions. . . . It is at variance with our praxis.”106 However, one reason the plan could be integrated into the communist university—and indeed, a primary reason it did not live up to its promises – was that it reinforced one of the basic political and organizational practices of the university, the division of the student body into circles or kruzhki.
The origins of kruzhki at Sverdlov can be traced to 1919. When lectures were predominant in the years after the party school’s founding, students were forced to sit through eight to ten hours of back-to-back two-hour lectures. In 1919 this was already recognized as a failure, and the first attempts to form kruzhki soon followed. “Collective discussions” were organized around set themes, such as “What is the grain monopoly,” or “What has soviet power given to workers and peasants?” The groups had about twenty-five students at first, later thirty-five to forty, and were divided by academic qualifications. But the kruzhki were not only organized for academic purposes; by 1923 they were considered the building block of party work within the cell system. The fundamental importance that the circles assumed in the 1920s becomes clear when it is discovered that the academic kruzhki were in fact identical to those which the party cell used to subdivide the students for political work.107
In other words, the very groups elevated to academic predominance under the Dalton Plan carried on the primary political discussions organized by the party cell.108 In the first semester of 1925–26, for example, these groups discussed the plenum of the Moscow party committee, the Central Committee’s October plenum, the Locarno treaty, and other topics connected to current political affairs. Rapid adjustments in the curriculum, if necessary, could also be implemented through the kruzhki. After Lenin’s death, for example, when a flurry of measures was taken in the middle of the year to “saturate” the curriculum with Leninism, it was the kruzhki organizers who met with Agitprop’s Popov and the academic departments to implement the changes.109
The kruzhki thus became the basic unit of both academic and party work. In the period after the purge of 1924 the cell bureau targeted oppositionists in the kruzhki not only during cell events but in academic discussions.110 But intervention was only one factor affecting the work of the kruzhki. If education was organized in the very same groups that debated the party resolutions, who could even attempt to say when an academic discussion began and a political struggle ended? The Dalton Plan helped tum the classroom less into a laboratory than into a literal extension of the party cell’s political arena.
Implementation of both party and academic purges was closely tied to the kruzhki. The general party purge of 1921 was conducted for Sverdlov students (those who had not already passed through purge commissions in their own localities) at open meetings of the kruzhki, with representatives from the Moscow raikom. Each kruzhok was charged with organizing the questionnaires and other necessary material for the purge commissions. In 1922 and 1923 regulations for annual end-of-year academic purges were finalized. According to these regulations, these purges were defined by “the general communist principles of a party review [proverka]” combined with the academic criteria appropriate for safeguarding higher Marxist education. In other words, the regulations for academic purges authorized from the start party-political considerations, the standards of communist byt, and academic-ideological criteria. In the 1923 purge of one of the more academically advanced “lecturer groups,” when one-fourth of the ninety-seven students were purged, seven were removed for insufficient practical party experience, five for academic insufficiencies, and five for unfavorable evaluations. At the height of the campaign against scholasticism, these students’ “manner of thinking [myshlenie]” was rated as either “abstract,” “concrete,” or “mixed.”111
Liadov’s kruzhok (circle) at Sverdlov Communist University in 1923–24. Martyn Nikolaevich Liadov, rector of the university, is in the second row, fifth from the left. Reprinted by permission of the Museum of the Revolution, Moscow, Russia.
In a rare published criticism of this system of evaluation, an article in the Sverdlov newspaper titled “Is this necessary?” the author described the heights of tension the purges provoked: “In the preliminary purges and repeat purges [perechistki] there were real battles [srazheniia], and if as a result there were no physical cripples, then there was no mean number of moral sufferers.” After all this many excluded students managed to be reinstated through political connections, the author claimed. “Cannot selection [of students] be limited by other means, but not by purges?” An answer was soon forthcoming: “Is control necessary?”112
One fact not recalled was that the academic purges had in fact replaced a traditional system of trimesterly examinations (zachety) used in 1921. The system of academic purges did include evaluations (spravki) on performance in each of the trimesters, but clearly the new system of evaluation gave much more of an opportunity to introduce questions relating to party work and standards of conduct. According to one 1923 report, for example, the group evaluations measured abilities, development, classwork, and party-mindedness (partiinost'). The latter category embraced such areas as party work, theoretical and practical abilities, and deviations, examples of which were individualism, petty-bourgeois philistinism (meshchanstvo), and inclinations toward private property (sobstvennichestvo). Other areas evaluated were activism (aktivnost’), relations with comrades, and opinions on important questions of sociopolitical life.113 The replacement of examinations with the purges therefore also increased the importance of the kruzhki. One account even boasted that these were no purges from above, but self-purges (samochistki).114
The Laboratory Plan, the system of purges, and the organization of party cell political life all worked together by 1924 to merge political, lifestyle, and academic evaluations of the rank and file into the single forum of the kruzhki. The combination must have produced an intensity in their functioning that is difficult to imagine. The kruzhki represented nothing less than the organizational fusion of the realms of politics, education, and byt.
Origins of the Great Break:
Self-Criticism and Power Relations
The top-down power structure at Sverdlov University had become an entrenched hierarchy typical of the party organization during NEP. The broadening of the communist disciplinary field affected everybody, to be sure, but superordinate authority remained far less vulnerable to it. That suddenly changed with the introduction of the criticism/self-criticism campaign of 1928. On the eve of the industrialization drive, the attack on specialists and right deviationists, and the purge of the party and state apparat, the war on bureaucracy legitimized and encouraged attacks on mid-level functionaries (and those loyal to Stalin’s rivals) throughout the system. The self-criticism campaign provided a fundamental tool in the Stalin faction’s consolidation of power and the launching of the Great Break.115
The entrenched power structure of NEP buckled under an upheaval of the rank and file, which was both encouraged and constrained at the top. Uglanov’s Moscow party organization, where discipline had been most tight, was affected with special force, as the entire Moscow leadership became associated with the “Right Deviation” in the leadership in the fall of 1928. In October, the turning-point in Uglanov’s ouster, the lists prearranged for low-level elections to raions and cells were abolished in the name of “broad democracy,” a temporary device to break the hold of local leaders that was repeated in the prewar period only on the eve of the Great Purge of 1937.116
At the same time, the nature of acceptible criticism was quickly constricted and superordinate authority maintained: Pravda articles and party directives made it abundantly clear that genuine “proletarian” criticism was supposed to be constructive, not turned on the foundations of the socialist state. Criticism could be dialectically transformed into self-criticism and forced upon anyone in a weakened position, again broadening the disciplinary regime. The campaign publicized a spate of byt scandals such as drunkenness, corruption, and rape, prompting Trotskyist oppositionists to accuse the Stalinists of boosting levels of degeneracy.117
The most important historical moment for the kruzhki at Sverdlov University came in 1928. The cell bureau was suddenly put in the same precarious position as local political powers throughout the country. It responded as countless other authorities did, by attempting to stifle unwanted criticism. In September and October 1928, stormy meetings at Sverdlov of a kind not seen since 1923–24 raised criticisms of the entire state of affairs at the university. Two issues—control of the cell bureau by the rector and administration, and the subordination of the kruzhki to the bureau—led to disruptive arguments in cell gatherings. During the assault on Uglanov’s Moscow party leadership in October, Liadov stormed out of one meeting, after which all the “faults” of the university were discussed.118
Pent-up frustrations of the rank and file were vented. One student demanded at a general party meeting, “The bureau must react on time to the decisions of the kruzhki . . . the [political] meetings of the kruzhki have been dead, since the speakers [dokladchiki assigned by the bureau] only paraphrase what is written in ‘Pravda.’” Another added that the main “line” of the university had been the “strangling of the activism of the student body.” A third chimed in that the party organizers in the circles frequently disrupted self-criticism and took no part in it. The response from the bureau, in the person of its secretary Volkov, was conciliatory. “In regard to freedom of speech [o svobode slova] and repression [zazhim], the meeting of the fourth-year class already noted that democracy has been significantly expanded in the past year. . . . Recently the bureau has attempted to guarantee a maximum of democracy.”119
The outpouring was extraordinary and connected with the ouster of Uglanov’s Moscow machine. Both Liadov and the Sverdlov bureau were compromisingly tied to the long-time head of the Moscow party organization; Uglanov was welcomed to Sverdlov even after the October 1928 Moscow Committee plenum, when Stalin and Molotov personally intervened in order to destablize his grip on the MK. Uglanov survived until November. At that time he was linked to the “Right,” and the entire Moscow organization was compromised. As 1928 drew to a close, the Sverdlov bureau was left scrambling to reverse itself, weed out rightists, and prove its orthodoxy anew. The rank and file blamed the cell bureau for not reacting to political signals in time, but the bureau leadership claimed the “whole university” was at fault.120
The bureau attempted to regain its balance, characteristically, by linking criticism of the bureau on the part of the kruzhki to oppositionism or deviationism. One student fought this at a party meeting in February 1929:
It is implied that all the criticism that has been turned directly against the bureau of the cell . . . has been criticism against the Central Committee. . . . This is, of course, a complete perversion of self-criticism. One might ask how will it be possible after this to speak out and criticize the cell bureau? . . . After all, how is it possible to speak and criticize, when any criticism against the bureau will be looked on as criticism against the TsK?121
In the discussions of the kruzhki themselves, where the self-criticism campaign was carried out, the rank and filer continued to complain that the students were constantly on the receiving end of criticism, but “organizers” were immune. Bureau attempts to bring the kruzhki under much tighter control were also discernible. This occurred, in part, through careful monitoring of statements made in the circles and an aggressive effort to criticize “mistakes” made in circle discussions.122 The effect of the bureau-kruzhki conflicts of 1928–29 was that the cell bureau began to document statements by rank-and-file students to a qualitatively higher degree than it had throughout the 1920s.
At the same time, the university as a whole was made more vulnerable because Liadov and the bureau were linked to the ousted Uglanov leadership. Political vulnerability thus increased everywhere: the rank and file were monitored more by the bureau, and the bureau was forced to prove the orthodoxy of the up.iversity as a whole when it faced the outside.123 Liadov appeared disoriented, first supporting the Uglanov leadership, then repenting after the tide turned. The most ferocious unmasker of deviations and degeneracy was now infected by the Right Deviation, and there was no cure. “When I meet close comrades, they turn away from me as from a betrayer of the party line, they try not to notice, they cross to the other side of the street,” he said pathetically. After having insisted for years that no deviation was accidental,’ that they were all symptoms of the same disease, he seemed to realize the hopelessness of his defense as he uttered it: “It is impossible to insist that for me this was not some kind of accidental mistake, that it was in the nature of my way of thinking.”124 Within the university, even as the cell bureau regained its dominance, Liadov was open to attack along with other top university administrators.125 The inversion of the power structure thus served to increase vulnerability all the way down the line, with the exception of the ascendent Stalin leadership. The rank and file, and the university as a whole, were now subject to abrupt mobilization. The Central Committee ordered Sverdlov and other party schools to carry out special early graduations in 1929 and again in 1930, in order to send upper-level students to the countryside during the drive for collectivization.126 At Sverdlov Communist University, the Great Break had begun.
The pseudo-populism of the self-criticism campaign, combined with the buckling of the party power hierarchy, had unleashed the pent-up pressures that had been building on the rank and file in previous years. The self-criticism session, emerging out of the campaign of 1928, became the institutionalized ritual by which the rank and file were not only invited but required to attack their immediate superiors.127 At the same time, the disciplinary regime, which encompassed an aspect of communist self-regulation, was expanded as the party watchword became struggle against deviations on both Left and Right. Only the idea of the single, monolithic center emerged unscathed. Having formed the paradigm for Stalin’s defeat of all oppositions, the dynamics of the Great Break were mythologized in the Party. As both model and tactic, they achieved the profound function of periodically venting the frustrations of the rank and file, of revitalizing the search for liberation and deviance, and reinforcing the center. The cycle of pseudo-democratic revivalism, temporary inversion of the power hierarchy, and purification-upheaval was reenacted in the Great Terror and again in the late 1940s.128
1. René Fülöp-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), xii, 264–317.
2. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams.
3. Robert Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution: A Study in Organizational Change, 1917–1923 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 144 and passim; and on militarization in the Party, von Hagen, Soldiers.
4. Vladimir I. Nevskii, “Sverdlovskii universitet i Oktiabr'skaia revoliutsiia,” in X [Desiat'] let Kommuniversiteta im. Ia. M. Sverdlova (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Kormmunisticheskogo universiteta im. Sverdlova, 1928), 19.
5. GARF f. 5221, op. 1, d. 14; l. 340; “Prograrnma zaniatii na sektsii po okhrane truda v Kommuniversitete Sverdlova,” February–September 1920, ibid., d. 4, l. 3–7; letters from Iakov M. Sverdlov to heads of cornmissariats, ibid., d. 1, l. 4–10. For other sections’ programs, see ibid., d. 3, l. 1, l. 19, and d. 2, l. 5–20.
6. GARF f. 5221, op. 1, d. 9, l. 16–19; “Zasedanie Uchebnogo Otdela Tsenttal'noi shkoly partiinoi i sovetskoi raboty. 24 noiabria 1919,” GARF f. 5221, op. 1, d. 1, l. 1; Programmy i uchebnyi plan obshche-teoreticheskogo kratkosrochnogo kursa Raboche-krest'ianskogo Kommunisticheskogo Universiteta im. Sverdlova (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1921), deposited at GARF f. 5221, op. 3, d. 4, l. 96–142; “Organizatsiia partiinoi shkoly,” Izvestiia TsK RKP(b), 7 June 1919; “Ustav Kommunisticheskogo Universiteta im. Sverdlova,” GARF f. 5221, op. 3, d. 4, l. 68–72.
7. “Organizatsiia partiinoi shkoly,” Isvestiia TsK RKP(b), 7 June 1919; GARF f. 5221, op. 9, d. 48, l. 4, and op. 8, d. 55, l. 158–63.
8. I. Przheborovskii, “Iz vospominanii starogo prepodavatelia,” in X let Kommuniversiteta, 282–83.
9. “Organizatsiia partiinoi shkoly,” Izvestiia TsK RKP(b), 7 June 1919, 1; Nevskii, “Sverdlovskii universitet,” 18–28; G. I. Okulova-Teodorovich, “Nachalo: vospominaniia,” Sverdlovets, no. 7–8 June–July 1923): 58–61. The other commission members were Pokrovskii, Riazanov, Skvortsov-Stepanov, and Bukharin.
10. Nevskii, “Sverdlovskii universitet,” 21–22; A. K. Timiriazev, “Kak voshlo estestvoznanie v prepodavanie Sverdlovskogo Universiteta,” in X let Kommuniversiteta, 165–69; see, for example, “Predmetnaia skhema obshchei programmy Kommunisticheskogo universiteta,” not earlier than 1923, GARF f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 1, l. 5756.
11. Janis Langins, “Words and Institutions during the French Revolution: The Case of ‘Revolutionary’ Scientific and Technical Education,” in Peter Burke and Roy Porter, eds., The Social History of Language, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 143; Langins, La république avait besoin de savants. Les débuts de I’École polytechnique: I’École centrale des travaux publiés et les cours révolutionnaires de l’an III (Paris: Belin, 1987).
12. As late as 1926–27, 80 percent of Sverdlov students had served in the Red Army, and all were party members of enough standing to be nominated by their party organizations. GARF f. 5221, op. 8, d. 55, l. 158–63. Sverdlov always led the communist universities with the highest percentage of students classified as working class. See “Kormmunisticheskie Universitety (po dannym statisticheskogo p/otdela Narkomprosa na 1-e ianvaria 1924 g.),” Kommunisticheskoe prosveshchenie, no. 3–4 (May–August 1924): 57–63. More detailed information on students in 1923–24 suggests that the student body’s formal education was minimal: the vast majority had either attended or finished grammar school, and only 10 percent had attended middle school. Candidates of peasant origin were required to have served in the Red Army. By nationality, over 60 percent of the group were Russians and about 20 percent Jewish; no other nationality comprised over 5 percent. See Kommunisticheskii Universitet imeni Ia. M. Sverdlova. Sostav studenchestva v 1923–24 uchebnom godu (Moscow, [1924?]). Of the Sverdlov faculty, as of 1925 there were 103 party and 52 nonparty teachers, but the social sciences were dominated by party members (87.5 percent) while in “general education” subjects, nonparty teachers predominated (76.5 percent). “Svedeniia o sostave sotrudnikov i prepodavatelei Komuniversiteta im. Sverdlova, 1 fev. 1925,” GARF f. 5221, op. 6, d. 514, l. 63.
13. “Stenogramma t. Antonova-Saratovskogo,” January 1923, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 233, l. 128; Aleksandr Aikhenval'd, “Studenchestvo vostavshikh nizov. Sverdlovets, kak sotsial'nyi tip,” Sverdlovets no. 7–8 June–July, 1923): 18–25. On the late imperial studenchestvo as a social community and its disintegration, see Morrissey, “More Stories,” 436–50.
14. “Protokol zasedaniia partorganizatorov 2-x god. kursa Sverdlovskogo Universiteta sovmestno s Biuro iacheiki, 10/VIII-21 g.” RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 13, l. 1; “Protokol No. 12 Obshchego sobraniia Kom. iacheiki Sverdlovskogo Universiteta ot 8 Iiulia 1921 g.,” ibid., d. 8, l. 17; Vinokur, “Nash ‘ugol,’” Sverdlovets, no. 7–8 June–July 1923): 67–69.
15. Service, Bolshevik Party, 50, 98, 117–19, 144, 168–71; Pervichnaia partiinaia organizatsiia. Dokumenty KPSS. Posleoktiabr'skii period (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1974).
16. As late as 1925–26, as much as one-fifth of the total number of propagandists used by the MK were students from Sverdlov, the Institute of Red Professors, and Moscow University. Catherine Merridale, Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin: The Communist Party in the Capital, 1925–1932 (London: Macmillan, 1990), 147.
17. On the soviet, see Kommunisticheskii Universitet imeni Ia. M. Sverdlova: X-mu Vserossiiskomu S"ezdu Sovetov (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Kommunisticheskogo universiteta im. Sverdlova, 1922), 5–6; “Protokoly zasedaniia Prezidiuma Soveta Komuniversiteta Sverdlova,” 1921, GARF f. 5221, op. 2, d. 9, l. 1–35. The bureau’s most influential branches were the organizational and agitprop departments. RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 8, l. 36–45; d. 15, l. 44; d. 27, l. 9–13; d. 31, l. 46, 57.
18. “Doklad Biuro komiacheiki Komuniversiteta im. Ia. M. Sverdlova v komissiiu, naznachennuiu v TsK RKP dlia obsledovaniiu Universiteta,” no date, 1921, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 66, l. 43–44; “Protokol No. 2 zasedaniia Smeshannoi komissii, ot 11 iiulia 1921 g.,” ibid., d. 66, l. 3–4; “Protokol No. 3 zasedaniia Smeshannoi komissii,” no earlier than 11 July 1921, ibid., l. 8–9.
19. “Stenogramma t. Antonova-Saratovskogo,” January 1923, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 233, l. 121, 126.
20. Antonov (1884–1965), from Saratov, had been a Social Democrat since 1902; he studied law and history at Moscow University, graduating in 1911, the year he was arrested and exiled. He became a leader of the Saratov Bolsheviks during the war, and from August 1917 to the end of 1918 he was chairman of the Saratov soviet. He later served as a judge in the Shakhtii and Promparty show trials of 1928 and 1930. V. I. Nevskii, ed., Deiateli revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v Rossii: Bio-bibliograficheskii slovar' (Moscow: OGIZ, 1931), 5:114.
21. T. H. Rigby, “A Dictatorship for Communism,” in The Changing Soviet System: Mono-organizational Socialism from Its Origins to Gorbachev’s Restructuring (Aldershot, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1990), 39, and 51.
22. Anne Gorsuch, “Enthusiasts, Bohemians, and Delinquents: Soviet Youth Cultures, 1921–1928” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1992), 25–27; Hilary Pilkington, Russia’s Youth and Its Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 43–60. Pilkington perceives parallels between youth and women in the communist state: both were seen as having special revolutionary potential, yet also comprising vulnerable segments of the proletariat requiring separate organizations.
23. Ivan Struev, “Itogi diskussii oh akademizme,” Sverdlovets, no. 2 (March 1922): 4.
24. “Pravila vnutrennogo rasporiadka v domakh, ohshchezhitiiakh i stoloviiakh Universiteta im. la. M. Sverdlova, vvodimye v deistvie s 1-go noiabria s/g.,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 501, l. 56–61.
25. “Protokol zasedaniia Biuro ot 3/XII-22 g.,” RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 14, l. 3–4; “Telefonogramma No. 421 iz Glavpolitprosveta Komm. Universitetu Sverdlova t. Antonovu, 14/I-23 g.,” GARF f. 5221, op. 5, d. 38, l. 7; N. Rusunov, “10 let Sverdlovii,” in X let Komuniversiteta, 88–89.
26. “Doklad t. Antonova,” no date, 1923, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 501, l. 3–7; “Stenogramma t. Antonova-Saratovskogo,” January 1923, ibid., d. 233. In fact, the Krasno-Presnenskii Raikom reported to the commission that the Sverdlov cell was the best and most active of all VUZ cells. “V TsK RKP. Tov. Liadovoi,” late 1922, ibid., d. 499, l. 2.
27. “Doklad t. Antonova,” cited in full at note 26; “Stenogramma t. Antonova-Saratovskogo,” cited in full at note 19, l. 129–31; “Zaved. P-otdelom propagandy K. Popov. V komissiiu po proverke Kommunisticheskogo Universiteta im. Ia. M. Sverdlova,” 16 January 1923, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 233, l. 119–20.
28. “Tov. Struev—2-aia lektorskaia gruppa,” no date, probo January 1923, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 500, l. 32–49; “Zasedanie 26/I-23 goda. Agit-prop. Otdel TsK RKP,” ibid., 1. 44–58, l. 45; “Protokoly komissii po obsledovaniiu Sverdlovskogo Universiteta ot 6/IV-23 g.,” ibid., l. 10–11.
29. “Zav. P/Otdel propagandy K. Popov Zav. Agitpropotdelom tov. Bubnovu. 29/IX-1922,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 236, l. 101; “Tezisy o normal'nom ustave dlia kommuniversitetov priniatye Ob"ed. Biuro Kommuniversiteta im. Sverdlova,” no date, ibid., d. 218, l. 34; “Normal'nyi ustav Kommuniversitetov. Utverzhden Orgbiuro TsK 23/VII-23 protokol No. 23,” GARF f. A-2313, op. 4, d. 69, l. 16–24; “Osnovnoe polozhenie Ustava Kommunisticheskogo Universiteta im. Ia. M. Sverdlova,” no date, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 33, l. 16–18; V. Veger, “Akademicheskaia zhizn' v Kommunisticheskom universitete,” Sverdlovets, no. 5–6 (March–April 1923): 20–21.
30. “Kommunisticheskie universitety ili kadestkie korpusa,” Sverdlovets, no. 4 (January 1923): 3, and on the militarization debate, von Hagen, Soldiers, 137–52 and passim.
31. “Protokol No. 72 zasedaniia Plenuma Ob"biuro iacheek, kursovykh iacheek i partorganizatorov ot 15/XII-23 g.,” RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 18, l. 14–15; “Protokol No. 1 zasedaniia Ispolbiuro sovmestno s partorganizatorami i otvetrukoviditeliami partkruzhkov,” 9 January 1924, ibid., d. 23, l. 1; E. H. Carr, The Interregnum, 1923–1924 (London: Macmillan, 1960), 312.
32. See M. N. Liadov, “O zadachakh i perspektivakh Kommunisticheskogo universiteta im. Ia. M. Sverdlova (Doklad na studencheskom sobranii),” in Chem dolzhen byt' Kommuniversitet (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Kommunisticheskogo universiteta im. Sverdlova, 1924), 3–12; for a biography of limited utility, see S. V. Deviatov, M. N. Liadov. Zabytaia biografiia (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo VZPI, 1992).
33. RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 18, l. 14; “Protokol No. 64 zasedaniia Plenuma Ob"biuro iacheek RKP(b) universiteta Sverdlova ot 29-go noiabria 1923 g.: ob intsidente na partsobranii,” ibid., l. 10–11; Mnukhin, “Beglye vospominaniia,” in X let Kommuniversiteta, 320–21.
34. One of the many transformations occurring in 1924, this was part of a broader plan to increase the power of the rectors of communist universities in the wake of the strong support for the opposition among student cells. “Postanovleniia i rezoliutsiia II-i konferentsii Kommuniversitetov, 1924,” GARF f. 5221, op. 5, d. 89, l. 15; see also GARF f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 87, l. 93. The presidium of the Sverdlov bureau was eliminated in 1926. “Tezisy otcheta o rabote Biuro iacheiki, 2 marta po 28-e sentiabria 1926 g.,” RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 27, l. 19–23.
35. “Protokol No. 1 obshche-partiinogo sobraniia Kommuniversiteta Sverdlova ot 28/IX-1926,” RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 27, l. 14–18; “Kratkie svedeniia o rabote iacheiki RKP(b) Komuniversiteta Sverdlova za period s 1/X-24 g. po 1/IV-25 g.,” ibid., d. 25, l. 69–74.
36. “Protokol zasedaniia Plenuma Biuro iacheiki RKP(b) Kommuniversiteta im Sverdlova. IX/29 [1925],” RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 25, l. 8–10; “Protokol zasedaniia Biuro iacheiki Kommuniversiteta Sverdlova ot 16–go sentiabria 1925 g.,” ibid., l. 40–43. Uglanov’s views on inner-party democracy were influenced by his personal belief in tight discipline, support for managers, and distrust of rank-and-file participation. See Merridale, Moscow Politics, 51 n. 25.
37. Service, Bolshevik Party, 168; “Protokol ob"edinennogo zasedaniia mestnykh biuro Universiteta Sverdlova ot 2/I-22,” RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, ed. khr. 15, l. 1.
38. GARF f. 5221, op. 4, d. 21, l. 55–56, and l. 84; RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 15, l. 1.
39. “Ustav distsiplinarnogo suda studentov Komm. Universiteta Sverdlova s vnesennymi izmeneniiami zasedaniia Biuro [iacheiki] ot 13 oktiabria 1921 g.,” GARF f. 5221, op. 3, d. 40, l. 26.
40. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, “Defining and Ignoring Labor Discipline in the Early Soviet Period: The Comrades-Disciplinary Courts, 1918–1922,” Slavic Review 51 (Winter 1992): 705–30; on VUZ comrades courts, Peter Konecny, “Library Hooligans and Others: Law, Order, and Campus Culture in Leningrad, 1924–1938,” Journal of Social History (forthcoming); on comrades courts in Komsomol clubs and youth communes, Gorsuch, “Enthusiasts,” 119.
41. “Protokol zasedaniia Prezidiuma Biuro iacheek Universiteta Sverdlova ot 10-go maia 1922,” RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 15, l. 55; “Partiinomu Sudu pri Kommunisticheskom Universitete. Zaiavlenie. 27/IV-21 g.,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 66, l. 53–54.
42. JI. Ivanov, Studenty v Moskve. Byt. Nravy. Tipy (Moscow: Tip. obshchestva rasprostraneniia poleznykh knig, 1903). See especially Mark D. Steinberg, “Vanguard Workers and the Morality of Class,” in Lewis Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 66–84.
43. “Molodoi rabochei gvardii,” Molodaia gvardiia, no. 1–2 (April–May 1922): 3–5.
44. RGAODgM f. 474, op. 1, ed. khr. 6, l. 69.
45. Emmons, Time of Troubles, 388.
46. Quoted extensively in A. Gorlov, “Bogdanovsko-messianskie otkroveniia k molodezhi,” in Komsomol'skii byt (Moscow-Leningrad: Molodaia gvardiia, 1927), 226–48.
47. Aikhenval'd, “Sverdlovets, kak sotsial'nyi tip,” 24–25.
48. “V. I. Lenin o sushchnosti kornmunisticheskoi partiinoi etiki (morali, nravstvennosti),” in M. A. Makarevich, ed., Partiinaia etika: Dokumenty i materialy diskussii 20-x godov (Moscow: Politizdat, 1989), 220–22. One of the most forceful arguments ever made for the Bolshevik class-based conception of morality is Trotskii’s “Ikh moral' i nasha,” Biulleten' oppozitsii, no. 68–69 (August–September 1938).
49. A. Kollontai, “Pis'ma k trudiasheisia molodezhi. Kakim dolzhen byt' kommunist?” Molodaia gvardiia, no. 1–2 (April–May 1922): 136–44.
50. A critique of Trotskii’s writings on bureaucratization, for example, argues that at their root lay hidden moral criteria about proper standards of behavior for Communists. David W. Lovell, Trotsky’s Analysis of Soviet Bureaucratization: A Critical Essay (London: Croom Helm, 1985). In fact, the discussion of bureaucratization was a subset of the debate about byt, and Trotskii was a leading participant in both. To act bureaucratically was thus as much a deviation from proper behavior as drunkenness. How else can one explain the seemingly bizarre concem with the “bad manners” of party secretaries in a leading theoretical discussion of state bureaucratization? (4).
51. A. A. Sol'ts, “Iz otcheta Tsenttal'noi Kontrol'noi Komissii na XI s"ezde RKP(b), 28 marta 1922 g.,” in Makarevich, Partiinaia etika, 141–45.
52. A. A. Sol'ts, “Iz zakliuchitel'nogo slova na XI s"ezde RKP(b),” in Makarevich, Partiinaia etika, 146.
53. Eric Nairman has discussed gastronomic and sexual implications of this revolutionary asceticism in “Revolutionary Anorexia (NEP as Female Complaint),” Slavic and East European Journal 37 (Fall 1993): 305–25.
54. It rejected a “detailed code” in favor of general principles, but the movement to ratify “norms of behavior” and ethical “laws” (zakony) continued into the mid-1920s. Some local Komsomol organizations passed such behavioral codes, in one instance at the provincial level with the approval of the Gubkom agitprop. The central Komsomol leadership criticized these codes for atternpting to decree what could only be the product of long-term “political-enlightenment work.” See Politicheskoe vospitanie Komsomola (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1925), 18–20.
55. On Nepification, “O partetike. Proekt predlozhenii prezidiuma TsKK II Plenumu TsKK RKP(b),” in Makarevich, Partiinaia etika, 151–70, and S. L'vov, “‘Nep’ v Gosudarstvennom Universitete,” Krasnyi student, no. 1 (1924): 36–37.
56. “Prilozhenie NKRKI SSSR o banketakh (utverzhdeno Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) 30.XII.26 g.),” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 608, l. 17–18.
57. V. Nevskii, “Restavratsiia idealizma i bor'ba s ‘novoi’ burzhuaziei,” PZM, no. 7–8 June–August, 1922): 113–31; A. M. Selishchev, Iazyk revoliutsionnoi epokhi: Iz nabliudenii nad russkim iazykom poslednykh let (1917–1926) (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1928), 196; Dvenadtsatyi S"ezd Rossiiskii kommunisticheskoi partii (bol'shevikov). Stenograficheskii otchet. 17–25 aprelia 1923 g. (Moscow: Krasnaia nov', 1923), 33. For a suggestive discussion of the “obsession of NEP’s transitional mentality with purity and corruption on all levels,” see Eric Naiman, “The Case of Chubarov Alley: Collective Rape, Utopian Desire, and the Mentality of NEP,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 17 (Spring 1990): 1–30.
58. Mervyn Mathews, Privilege in the Soviet Union: A Study of Elite Life-Styles under Communism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978), 59–90. For a contemporary analysis of the “restoration of the social pyramid” by the sociologist Pitrim Sorokin, see V. V. Sapov, ed., “Zabytaia stat'ia Pitrima Sorokina,” Vestnik Rossiiskoi akademii nauk 62, no. 2 (1992): 125–29. For the Politburo special commission report on “Kremlin privileges”—compiled during the 1920 discussion of the rift between party “uppers” and “lowers,” but stopped from dissemination—see “Kak zhili v Kremle v 1920 godu. Materialy Kremlevskoi komissii TsK RKP(b),” Neizvestnaia Rossiia XX Vek (Moscow: Istoricheskoe nasledie, 1992), 2:261–81.
59. E. M. Iaroslavskii, “O partetike. Doklad na II Plenume TsKK RKP(b) 5 Oktiabria 1924,” in Makarevich, Partiinaia etika, 170–96; Fülöp-Miller, Mind and Face, 394–99.
60. N. Bukharin, “Za uporiadochenie byta molodezhi,” in Komsomol'skii byt, 99; Lev Davydovich Trotskii, “Voprosy byta,” in Sochineniia (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1927), 21:3–58.
61. Boris Volin, “Bol'sheviki-zaezzhateli,” Na postu, no. 4 (November 1923): 11–28; Selishchev, Iazyk, 68–69, 83. Stalin repeated a similar statement in 1927 in “Trotskistskaia oppozitsiia prezhde i teper',” in Sochineniia (Moscow: OGIZ, 1946–51), 10:175.
62. “Za leninskoe ponimanie voprosov kul'turnoi revoliutsii,” lead editorial, Revoliutsiia i kul'tura 15 June 1928, 5–7; M. A. Reisner, “Bogema i kul'turnaia revoliutsiia,” Pechat' i revoliutsiia, no. 5 July–August 1928): 95.
63. See the discussion in E. Troshchenko, “Vuzovskaia molodezh',” Molodaia gvardiia, no. 4 (April 1927): 129–43, esp. 132–33.
64. M. Rafail, “‘Iurovshchina’ i ee korni,” Revoliutsiia i kul'tura, no. 12 (30 June 1928), 21–26. The work of both Konecny, “Library Hooligans,” and Gorsuch, “Enthusiasts,” focuses on recalcitrant student subcultures, such as “bohemians,” which reflected the failure of the dominant culture fully to reshape attitudes.
65. B. Krasnyi, “Tipy prikreplennykh,” Sverdloviia, 31 May 1923, 2.
66. “V Prezidium Komuniversiteta im. Sverdlova ot studenta 3-kursa 9 kruzhka S. M. Krianga. 5-IX-22 g.,” GARF f. 5221, op. 4, d. 25, l. 49, and a similar case on l. 52.
67. Kendall E. Bailes, “Alexei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism,” Soviet Studies 29 (July 1977): 378–80; P. Romanov, “Sud nad pionerom,” Molodaia gvardiia, no. 1 (January 1927): 86–91.
68. Ibeen-Shtrait, “Studencheskie kommuny,” Krasnyi student, no. 8–9 (August–September 1924): 44–45; Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 205–22; Gorsuch, “Enthusiasts,” 124–28.
69. “Nekotorye stat'i ustava ‘kommun trudovoi molodezhi’ (proekt),” no date, GARF f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 57, l. 138; “Zaiavlelenie pri vystuplenii v kommuny trudovoi molodezhi Vasmannogo Raiona,” no date, ibid., l. 143; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 50.
70. “Dokladnaia zapiska (po zhilishchnomu voprosu Universiteta),” no date, 1923, GARF f. 5221, op. 6, d. 81, l. 15; “Ustav kommuny im. M. N. Liadov,” 4 October 1926, RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 27, l. 87–96, and d. 31, l. 46.
71. Emmanuel Enchmen was a former SR and sometime worker in Ivan P. Pavlov’s laboratory on conditioned reflexes, whose 1920 Eighteen Theses Concerning the Theory of the New Biology took an extreme materialist view rejecting all causality outside physiological reflex; S. Minin propounded an extreme positivism repudiating abstract thought as tools of the exploiters. Both counted virtually their only supporters among the communist students of the early 1920s, and Minin apparently propagandized sympathetic students at Sverdlov University in 1920–21. David Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, 1917–1932 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 93–97. These two “deviations” expressed in exaggerated form what the dialecticians came to call “philosophobia,” scientistic and mechanistic trends common in early Soviet Marxism. See, for example, A. Troitskii, “Filosofiia na sluzhbe revoliutsii,” PZM, no. 4–5 (April–May 1924): 12–19. When Enchmenism and Mininism were condemned, they were associated with the rejection of the concept of morality on the part of communist students.
72. By comparison, German nationalist and Nazi usages defined degeneracy as a fusion of political and aesthetic qualities indicating “inferior racial, sexual, and moral types.” See Stephanie Barron, “Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany,” in Barron et al., eds., “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles: County Museum of Art, 1991), 11–13.
73. I. Bobryshev, Melkoburzhuaznye vliianiia sredi molodezhi, 2d rey. ed. (Moscow-Leningrad: Molodaia gvardiia, 1928), 98, 101. According to Kennth M. Pinnow, suicide in Bolshevik discourse represented an antithesis of the championed values of strength, optimism, and submersion of the ego in the collective. Pinnow, “Out of the Morgue and into Society: Suicide Statistics and the Creation of a ‘Soviet’ Forensic Medicine in Russia, 1920–1929” (paper presented at the fifth World Congress for Central and East European Studies, 1995).
74. S. I. Malashkin, Luna s pravoi storony, ili neobyknovennaia liubov' (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1927). Malashkin began his literary activities as a proletarian poet and worker from Sormovskii zavod. A. O. [Pavel Ivanovich Lebedev-Polianskii], review of S. Malashkin, Muskuly. Poemy (Moscow: Krasnyi Dom, 1918), in Proletarskaia kul'tura, no. 6 (February 1919): 41–42. The interesting debate around his novel Luna is largely reprinted in S. Gusev, ed., Kakova zhe nasha molodezh'? Sbornik statei (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1927), but see also the 1926 Communist Academy discussion, “Lebedev-Polianskii, P. I. O povesti Malashkina ‘Luna s pravoi storony.’ Stenogramma doklada i preniia po dokladu na zasedanii sektsii po literature i iskusstvu, 13 dekabria 1926,” ARAN f. 350, op. 2, d. 86, l. 1–85. For a review of the most frequently discussed literary works on the topic of “degeneracy” and student sexual mores by a participant in the antidegeneracy campaign, see Bobryshev, Melkoburzhuaznye vliianiia sredi molodezhi, 114–27.
75. According to Francis Bernstein, “sexual enlightenment,” as propounded especially by venereologists, neuropsychiatrists, and social hygenists in the Commissariat of Public Health, was conceived as a major part of the “struggle for a new byt.” Physicians played a prominent role in conceptualizing sexual normality and abnormality, until more punitive methods of control emerged in the late 1920s and sexual matters disappeared from public discussions after 1932. Bernstein is completing a Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation, “‘What Everyone Should Know about Sex’: Narkomzdrav and Sexual Enlightenment, 1918–1932.”
76. See N. Kazanskii, “Kollektivisticheskoe tuskneet, kogda slishkom raspukhaet liubov',” Krasnyi student, no. 4–5 (1924): 41–42; and advice from the experts: Professors Ivan Ariamov, “Znachenie sokhraneniia polovoi energii dlia molodezhi,” and B. Gorinevskii, “Polovoi vopros,” both in Komsomol'skii byt, 287–90 and 283–86, and E. Iaroslavskii, “Neskol'ko slov o byte,” 30 March 1926, RTsKhIDNI f. 89, op. 9, d. 53, l. 3. On social and political themes in scientists’ post-1905 discussion of sexuality, see Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 243–45.
77. F. W., “Voprosy vospitatel'noi raboty,” Sverdlovets, no. 5–6 (March-April 1923): 38–44; “Anketa o polovoi zhizni studentov Kommunisticheskogo Universiteta,” Zapiski Kommunisticheskogo universiteta imeni Ia. M. Sverdlova (henceforth cited at ZKS) 1 (January 1923): 370–409; Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Sex and Revolution: An Examination of Literary and Statistical Data on the Mores of Soviet Students in the 1920s,” Journal of Modern History 50 (June 1978): 252–78; Engelstein, Keys, 248–53; Morrissey, “More Stories,” 256–57, 378.
78. The above is drawn from Aleksandr Etkind, Eros nevozmozhnogo: Istoriia psikhoanaliza v Rossii (Moscow: Gnosis, 1994), 260–64, and the many books published by Zalkind in the 1920s.
79. Liadov’s own statements in fact display a distinct continuity with social-democratic responses to the “sexual question” in the post-1907 discussion. See Engelstein, Keys, 377–79.
80. M. N. Liadov, “Blizhaishie zadachi v bor'be s upadochnymi nastroeniiami i, v chastnosti, s ‘eseninizmom,’” K leninskoi uchebe, no. 6 (October–November 1926): 9–18, and “The Functions of a Communist University,” Labour Monthly 8 July 1926): 435–40; and I. V. Stalin, “O pravom uklone v VKP(b),” in Sochineniia 12:31–39.
81. TsKK-RKI v osnovnykh postanovleniiakh partii (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1927), 3–22; “Iz polozhenii o kontrol’nykh komissiiakh vsem partiinym organizatsiiam RKP,” Izvestiia TsK RKP(b), 20 December 1920, reprinted in Makarevich, Partiinaia etika, 127–28; Desiatyi s"ezd Rossiiskoi kommunisticheskoi partii. Stenograficheskii otchet (8–16 marta 1921 g.) (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1921), 33–36.
82. TsKK-RKI, 90; E. M. Iaroslavskii, “Vystuplenie o vnutripartiinom polozhenii. Stenogramma,” probably November or December 1927, RTsKhIDNI f. 89, op. 8, d. 513, l. 5; I., “Vokrug s"ezda RKP (pis'mo iz Moskvy),” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, 16 January 1926, 16, and “Po Rossii,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, 1 November 1926; XIV S"ezd Vsesoiuznoi Kommunisticheskoi partii (b). 18–31 dekabria 1925 g. Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1926), 566, 595–96.
83. A. A. Sol'ts, “O partetike. Doklad, chitannyi v Kommunisticheskom Universitete im. Ia. M. Sverdlova,” in Makarevich, Partiinaia etika, 278.
84. Trotskii to Bukharin, 4 March 1926, Trotsky Archive, bMS Russ 13T-868; S. Kanatchikov, Istoriia odnogo uklona, 5th ed. (Leningrad: “Priboi,” 1925), 3–7.
85. For a protest against the view of students as “third-class party members,” see S. B-ich, “Bol'noe v vuzovskoi deistvitel'nosti,” Krasnoe studenchestvo, no. 5 (May 1926): 76–78.
86. Vladimir Petrovich Antonov-Saratovskii, “Universitet imeni Sverdlova v 1921–22 g.,” ZKS 1 (January 1923): 247–303; “Protokol zasedaniia Metodicheskoi komissii pri kafedre Istorii,” 4 May 1923, GARF f. 5221, op. 4, d. 29, l. 13; “Otchet Rektora o rabote Kommunisticheskogo Universiteta im. Sverdlova Za 21–22 uchebnyï god,” no date, 1922, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 233, l. 6–26. For example, Lunacharskii lectured on Russian literature, Kritsman taught economic history, Stalin gave his 1924 lectures on Leninism. On Chaianov's teaching at Sverdlov, see “Otvet klevetnikam,” Sverdlovets, no. 2 (March 1922): 15.
87. S. Muraveiskii, “Voprosy uchebnoi raboty Komm. Universitetov (Iz doklada na zasedaniia Uchebnogo Soveta 14 aprelia 1924 g.),” in Chem dolzhen byt' Kommuniversitet, 15–26; Simonov, “Uchebnaia rabota v Sverdlovii za 1927–28 uchebnom godu,” in X let Kommuniversiteta, 52–79.
88. “Tezisy k dokladu Liadova o reorganizatsii Komvuzov. (Materialy k s"ezdu rektorov Komvuzov),” no date, 1923, GARF f. 5221, op. 5, d. 89, l. 1; “Otvetnye tezisy t. Popova K. A. O tezisakh Sverdlovskogo Komm. Universiteta,” no date, 1923, ibid., l. 5–6; “Soveshchanie prepodavatelei Universiteta im. Sverdlova 8/X-23. Doklad t. Liadova ‘Zadachi Universiteta i metody prepodavaniia,’” ibid., d. 71, l. 1–2 ob.
89. “Postanovleniia i rezoliutsiia II-i konferentsii Kommuniversitetov 1924,” GARF f. 5221, op. 5, d. 89, l. 8–19.
90. After the introduction of the three-year course, enrollment had declined from 1,910 in 1921–22 to 1,073 in 1923–24. With the purge of 1924, the student body was slashed to 530 for 1924–25. Enrollment climbed back to 717 by 1927–28; a fourth year of study was added in 1925–26. In contrast to this decline, one notes a sharp rise in the percentage of students coming from the working class, from 45.7 percent in 1919–20, to nearly 70 percent in 1922–24. After new proletarianization policies were set by the party in 1924, this figure jumped to over 80 percent from 1924–25 through 1927–28. GARF f. 5221, op. 9, d. 48, l. 4. Slightly different numbers are cited in ibid., op. 8, d. 55, l. 158–63.
91. M. N. Liadov, “Dostizheniia Sverdlovii (Doklad na plenume MK VKP(b) 1928 g.),” in X let Kommuniversiteta, 45–46. Of the approximately 70 percent workers at Sverdlov in 1923–24, 34 percent were classified as industrial workers. B. M. Gessen, “Zadachi Universiteta i uroven' prepodavaniia,” ZKS 2 (1924): 295–303.
92. The majority of these women achieved the necessary party experience in the Central Committee's Zhenotdel, from which they were nominated. See GARF f. 5221, op. 8, d. 55, l. 158–63; “Protokol soveshchaniia studentok Sverdlovskogo Komuniversiteta,” 1929, no exact date, RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 33, l. 74. In January 1922 women comprised 7.8 percent of the Party's membership, 13.7 in October 1929. On the Party's gender structure, see Rigby, Communist Party Membership, 360–63.
93. “Stenogramma zasedaniia ekonomicheskoi kafedry 24 sentiabria 1923 g.,” in Sbornik po voprosam partprosveshcheniia (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Kommunisticheskogo universiteta im. Sverdlova, 1924), 164–69; “Diskussiia o programme po politekonomii v Kommvuze: zasedanie ot 15 marta 1924 g.,” ZKS 2(1924): 326–70; Pokrovskii's remarks in “Stenogramma zasedanii Nauchno-Politicheskoi Sektsii GUS-a, 20 marta 1925g,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 5, l. 142–48; “Protokol zasedaniia Pravleniia Komuniversiteta im. Sverdlova ot 24/VIII-24,” GARF f. 5221, op. 6, d. 54, l. 11.
94. On the Narkompros educators and postrevolutionary pedagogy, see Oskar Anweiler, Geschichte der Schule und Pädagogik in Ruβland vom Ende des Zarenreiches bis zum Beginn der Stalin-ära (Berlin: Quelle & Meyer Verlag, 1964), 155–77, and Larry E. Holmes, The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse: Reforming Education in Soviet Russia, 1917–1931 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 27–36.
95. Helen Parkhurst, Education on the Dalton Plan (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1922); Evelyn Dewey, The Dalton Laboratory Plan (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1922); C. W. Kimmins and Belle Rennie, The Triumph of the Dalton Plan (London: I. Nicholson & Watson, 1932).
96. N. Krupskaia, review of Parkhurst and Dewey, Na putiakh k novoi shkole, no. 3 (November 1922): 164–68; “Primechanie redaktsii,” Na putiakh k novoi shkole, no. 3 (May 1923), 254–55. On Krupskaia’s views of Dewey from 1916 until his visit to the USSR in 1928, see John T. Zepper, “Krupskaya on Dewey’s Educational Thought,” School and Society 100 January 1972): 19–21, and Anweiler, Geschichte, 159–62.
97. A. F. Ryndich, “Ocherk razvitiia metodiki sovpartshkol i komvuzov,” in Ryndich, Metodika, 7–48.
98. A. F. Ryndich, ed., Laboratornyi plan i ego znachenie v metodike kommunisticheskogo vospitaniia (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Kommunisticheskogo universiteta im. Sverdlova, 1926); “Ocherk razvitiia”; “Dal'tonskii laboratomyi plan v sovpartshkolakh (po dokladu tt. Krupskoi i Briunelli),” in Ryndich, Metodika, 164–68; and A. Fil'shtinskii, “Blizhaishie zadachi metodiki,” Leninskaia ucheba, no. 1 (January 1926): 14–18.
99. Evgenii Briunelli, “K voprosu o primenenii Dal'tonovskogo laboratornogo plana v sovpartshkolakh,” Kommunisticheskoe prosveshchenie, no. 4–5 (June–October 1923): 65–68; A. Fil'shtinskii, “Dalton-plan i issledovatel'skii metod,” in A. F. Ryndich, ed., Sovpartshkoly i komvuzy (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1926), 132; Anweiler, Geschichte, 260–85; John T. Zepper, “N. K. Krupskaya on Complex Themes in Soviet Education,” Comparative Educational Review 9 (February 1965): 33–37.
100. Fil'shtinskii, “Dalton-plan,” 132.
101. V. S. Izmozik, Glaza i ushi rezhima: Gosudarstvennyi politicheskii kontrol' za naseleniem Sovetskoi Rossii v 1918–1928 godakh (St. Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo Sankt-Peterburgskogo Universiteta Ekonomiki i Finansov, 1995), 123, 133.
102. Even 1926 official plans for the universities still allocated half the time for lectures. P. Valeskaln, “Ugroza novym metodam prepodavaniia,” Krasnoe studenchestvo, no. 9 (November 1926), 11–12; A. I. Dzens-Litovskii, “K voprosu o Dal'ton-laboratornom plane i lektsionnom metode v vysshei i povyshennogo tipa shkolakh,” Nauchnyi rabotnik, no. 9 (September 1926): 59-62. Even the rector of Leningrad University, the philologist N. S. Derzhavin, subjected the new pedagogy to a blistering attack in “K voprosu o metodakh prepodavaniia v vysshei shkole,” Nauchnyi rabotnik, no. 5–6 (May–June 1926): 37–50.
103. For example, “Zadachi ‘Leninskoi Ucheby,'” Leninskaia ucheba, no. 1 (January 1926): 3, and I. Petin, “Nuzhna li kollektivnaia konsul'tatsiia v laboratornom plane,” ibid., 32.
104. A. F. Ryndich, “Laboratornyi plan na konferentsii Komvuzov (3–5 fev. 1926 g.),” in Ryndich, Sovpartshkoly i komvuzy, 121; and Ryndich, “Ocherk razvitiia,” 39.
105. “Protokol No. 17 zakrytogo zasedaniia Biuro iacheiki Komuniversiteta Sverdlova ot 17/III-1927 g.,” RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 29, l. 16.
106. “Stenogramma plenuma chlenov Sotsialisticheskoi Akademii. 11.10.1923 g.,” ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 19, l. 37–38.
107. “Metody raboty v Komm. universitet im. Ia. M. Sverdlova,” no date, GARF f. A-2313, op. 4, d. 35, l. 4–6; V. Riabokon', “Ocherednye zadachi partraboty,” Sverdloviia, 31 May 1923, 1; I. Onotskii, “Nekotorye itogi i perspektivy raboty iacheiki VKP(b) Sverdlovskogo Universiteta,” Leninskaia ucheba, no. 2–3 (March-April 1926): 57–58.
108. The connection between the Dalton Plan and the kruzhki seems confirmed by the passage by the Third Conference of Soviet-Party Schools, the very body that recommended adoption of the Dalton Plan in 1924, of a resolution calling for special attention to be focused on the formation of party kruzhki within the party cells of all the schools. GARF f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 115, l. 88.
109. Onotskii, “Nekotorye itogi,” 58; “Protokol No. 6 ot 16/II-24 g. Zasedaniia Partkafedry sovmestno s kruzhkovodami,” GARF f. 5221, op. 5, d. 124, l. 5–6.
110. “Vypiska iz otcheta Biuro iacheiki VKP(b),” no exact date, 1924, RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 23, l. 16.
111. “Protokol ot 9 oktiabria 1921 g. zasedaniia Biuro sovmestno s partorganizatorami dvukhgodichnogo kursa,” RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 13, l. 11; “Polozhenie o proverke osnovnogo kursa,” 1922–23, no exact date, GARF f. 5221, op. 4, d. 71, l. 17; “Chistka lektortsev,” Sverdloviia, 28 June 1923, 3. This prompted the author of this artiele to query: why not half-mixed or a quarter-mixed?
112. I. S., “Nuzhno Ji eto?” Sverdloviia, 31 May 1923, 1; V. I. V., “Nuzhen Ji kontrol'?” ibid., 18 June 1923, 3.
113. V. Veger, “Prezhde i teper' (piatiletie universiteta Sverdlova),” Kommunisticheskoe prosveshchenie, no. 3 (May-June 1923): 50–52.
114. F. I. Shablonskii, “Chistka v vysshei partshkole (Iz opyta Universiteta Sverdlova),” Sverdlovets, no. 4 (January 1923): 8.
115. The fact that many arrests resulted from critical articles in the “wall papers,” often handwritten newspapers put out with input from the rank and file, shows that the announcement of the self-criticism campaign produced genuine upheaval. For example, “Razve stengazeta vinovata? Stengazeta pod arestom,” Stennaia gazeta, 17 February 1929, 1. Moscow Trotskyists, however, immediately perceived the campaign's political uses and interpreted the introduction of “self-criticism” as a Stalinist tool to engineer a “palace coup.” See Trotsky Archive, bMS Russ 13T-1392.
116. Merridale, Moscow Politics, 211, 302 n. 130. I am also indebted to her discussion of the self-criticism campaign, 211–15 and passim.
117. Moscow (?) Trotskyists, “O Samokritike,” 2 June 1928, Trotsky Archive, bMS Russ 13T-1612.
118. “Protokol obshchego partsobraniia studentov II kursa Universiteta im. Sverdlova ot 8/X-1928 g.,” RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 30, l. 33.
119. “Protokol No. 1 obshchego sobraniia iacheiki VKP(b) Komuniversiteta Sverdlova ot 25/ IX-28 g.,” RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 30, l. 7–8.
120. Merridale, Moscow Politics, 46–67; “Protokol No. 3 obshcheuniversitetskogo sobraniia iacheiki VKP(b) Komuniversiteta Sverdlova ot 20/X-1928,” RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 30, l. 38–41.
121. “Protokol obshchego sobraniia iacheiki Komuniversiteta Sverdlova ot 5/II-29 g.,” RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 32, l. 2.
122. For example, “V pravlenie Universiteta i Biuro iacheiki [ot] Studenta 7 kruzhka IV kursa Osipova O. M.,” no date, RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 33, l. 94; “Rezoliutsiia biuro iacheiki po itogam prorabotki partkruzhkami reshenii Moskovskoi XVII-i Gubpartkonferentsii priniataia edinoglasno ot 3-go Marta 1929,” ibid., l. 54–55.
123. “Tezisy k otchetu Biuro Iacheiki,” covering October 1928–October 1929, RGAODgM f. 459. op. 1, d. 32, l. 30; “Otchet 1-go kursa za 1928–1929 Uchebnyi god,” GARF f. 5221, op. 11, d. 31, l. 26–34; “Protokol No. 7 obshchego sobraniia iacheiki Komuniversiteta Sverdlova ot 29/1–1929,” RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 32, l. 1.
124. “Mandelshtam (Liadov). VI Plenum MK i MKK VKP(b) . . . Preniia,” no date, Trotsky Archive, bMS Russ T-2798.
125. See clippings from newspaper Sverdloviia in RGAODgM, f. 459, op. 1, d. 33, l. 25; “Protokol No. 18 zasedanüa Biuro iacheiki Sverdlova ot 15-II-29,” ibid., l. 22; “Zaiavlenie [v Pravlenie i Biuro iacheiki],” no date, 1929, ibid., l. 27.
126. “O rabote sovpartshkol v 1929–30 uchebnom godu,” GARF f. A-2313, op. 5, d. 150, l. 3, and “Zasedanie po chistke Glavpolitprosveta, 2-go ianvaria 1930 g.,” RTsKhIDNI f. 12, op. 1, d. 509, l. 16. In 1932 Sverdlov University’s academic character and political prestige were drastically altered, as communist universities were turned into “higher communist agricultural schools” by Central Committee decree. See Leonova, Iz istorii, 37, 53.
127. Self-criticism as a Stalinist ritual which could temporarily invert the power hierarchy is discussed by Alexei Kojevnikov in “Games of Soviet Democracy: Ideological Discussions in Science Around 1948” (paper presented to tite Midwest Russian History Workshop, Indiana University, 1995).
128. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 293–97; Yoram Gorlizki, “Party Revivalism and the Death of Stalin,” Slavic Review 54 (Spring 1995): 1–22; on Stalin's defeat of his rivals and mythopoesis in party history, George Enteen, “Soviet Historiography and the Problem of Myth” (forthcoming).