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POLITICAL CULTURE AT THE INSTITUTE OF
RED PROFESSORS

The problem-ridden endeavor of creating red experts, communist scholars, and proletarian intellectuals was endowed with an institutional base with the founding of the Institute of Red Professors (IKP) in 1921. The immediate justification for establishing the Party’s only graduate-level institution of higher learning was the need for university scholars in the Marxist social sciences. But during NEP IKP actually sent only 25 percent of its graduates into academic careers. As “one of the weapons of our party on the ideological front,” its mission quickly broadened to encompass the training of the cream of the new party intelligentsia and a political “changing of the guard” (smena).1 This link between the attempt to forge a political elite and the Party’s own most advanced educational endeavor turned IKP into the most important center of party-Marxist training for rising party politicians, publicists, and scholars in the 1920s.

IKP’s special mission and identity, therefore, was of all the party institutions most closely bound up with the great revolutionary theme of the red expert — two words which, by the entire situation the Party found itself after 1917, were invariably placed in stark opposition to one another, but whose coupling encompassed the scope of the institute’s task in a nutshell. The graduates expected from the new institutions would be both. revolutionaries and scholars, Bolsheviks and intellectuals, reds and experts. The combination would address one of the acute dilemmas of the early Soviet period, the forced reliance on the bourgeois specialist, who could not be of the Revolution even if he were learned and loyal. The red professor would acquire and then impart knowledge as a learned Bolshevik revolutionary, ultimately obviating the reliance on old elites and ensuring victory on the third front. In a landmark speech in 1924 on the young generation of “red specialists” and “our own professors,” Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, the Politburo member and party theorist closely associated with IKP, affirmed that the type of people trained would answer “the question ‘Who Will Beat Whom’ [Kto Kogo].”2

Such was the context of aspirations in which the Institute of Red Professors came into being, which inclined this pathbreaking center of Bolshevik thought to develop the project of creating the red expert as much in terms of party, state, and society as academia, education, and scholarship. What was at stake in training red professors — and this informed the history of the institution in concrete ways ranging from the prosecution of purges to the production of red scholarship — was the necessity of raising up an ideal new group, a squared circle of an intelligentsia with all the positive attributes of the steely-eyed proletariat and none of the negative ones of the quavering bourgeois intellectual.

The prospect of raising up a new stratum of intellectuals in an officially egalitarian “dictatorship of the proletariat” confronted the Bolsheviks with many of their thorniest dilemmas and unspoken taboos. Education of a new intelligentsia might be construed to mean that the society which, according to Lenin’s dictum, “any cook” could govern was creating a closed, elite caste; that intellectual activity and specialized knowledge might take precedence over physical labor; and that “scholastic” higher learning had triumphed over revolutionary praxis. IKP’s evolution, therefore, reflected all the tensions and conflicts growing out of its contradictory attempt to raise up an anti-elitist elite. Its very name, the Institute of Red Professors, embodied these tensions.

As a crucible of politics and culture for a younger generation of party intellectuals in the 1920s, IKP was able to cultivate a distinctively combative variety of Bolshevik political culture. This put red professors at the forefront in elaborating a ritualistic system, rooted in that culture, for identifying political and ideological deviance. Indeed, IKP’s political culture, reflecting the ethos of the rising party intelligentsia, influenced the direction of Marxist thought at the institute; further, the party style in intellectual life epitomized by IKP began to spread to the broader academic world.

The history of political-ideological struggle in the 1920s within the context of communist political culture at IKP suggests the much broader necessity of rethinking the nature of inner-party opposition. In this area, as elsewhere, party politics has been approached in far too narrow a fashion. In light of a richly expressive political culture spurring the development of powerful rites and ideological constructs centrally concerned with prosecuting or deflecting charges of deviationism, it becomes impossible to interpret political struggles as a straightforward confrontation of forces. In fact, by the time of what will be called the invention of a “Right Opposition” in 1928–29, allegedly finding a bastion of support at IKP, the development of communist political culture often precluded clear-cut alignments of political forces or declarations of allegiance. Rather, the political culture, which will be explored through the vehicle of IKP, had become so centered around hiding potential opposition and revealing deviation that the political process itself had acquired the stylized character of drama and had assimilated the Marxist-Leninist methodology of “unmasking” what was to a significant degree a fictitious, ubiquitous, and necessary opponent.

In Search of the Red Specialist:
Qualifications versus “Scholasticism”

Institut krasnoi professury was founded on 20 March 1921 by a Sovnarkom decree signed by Lenin as a three-year graduate school with departments of history, economics, and philosophy.3 Pokrovskii and a core group of party scholars such as Viacheslav P. Volgin, Nikolai M. Lukin, Vladimir V. Adoratskii, and Abram M. Deborin, as well as top Bolshevik leaders like Preobrazhenskii, Radek, and Bukharin, oversaw a significant expansion during the mid-1920s. In 1924 a fourth year of study was added for advanced students, a two-year “preparatory section” was established to promote students of proletarian and peasant origin, and in following years departments of law, natural science, literature, and party history were added. In 1921, 93 students entered the institute; by 1928 this figure had increased to 483.4 With most of the stars among Bolshevik scholars and theorists at some point connected to the institute, it developed an intensive and rigorous academic program in the early 1920s not only focusing on Marxist classics but also including immersion in “pre-Marxist” philosophers and non-Marxist political economists and historians.5 Many early graduates became leading party scholars themselves or prominent party litterateurs.6 But it was one of the fundamental paradoxes of IKP’s pathbreaking attempt to create the red expert that this academic rigor, while cementing the nascent institution’s reputation, was a dubious success; it raised fundamental fears that the new intellectual would be more professorial than red.

Such fears became overriding concerns grounded in the scope of the ambitions the Party held for a new party intelligentsia; they were exacerbated by continuous innovations of the early 1920s that strove to create, even as the Party’s scholarly forces were weak, a more perfect identification between Marxism as an intellectual system and Bolshevism as a political movement. By this I mean to raise the most basic problem that surfaced soon after the institute’s founding: its identity as a specifically communist school. “Our task is, above all, to prepare good Marxists,” Pokrovskii declared in the first publication of the red professors’ work; yet in the next breath he stressed the students “are not only future professors, but party workers as well.”7 There was no clear precedent to determine the concrete implications of this determination to train both scholars and Communists. Was it not sufficient to accept Marxist methodology (and at least not be anti-Soviet), or did all red professors have to be party members? If so, how would newcomers and converts from other socialist parties be accepted into the fold?

Because the commission of party intellectuals that founded the institute believed it would be lucky to find 25 young Communists to join IKP, according to Pokrovskii, non–party members were allowed to apply for IKP’s first class in 1921. Instead they were flooded with 289 applications, including a large response from party members who wished to resume their educations after the interruption of the civil war. After 192 were invited for testing, 93 were accepted, among them a small group of only about 10 non–party members.8 While their numbers were hardly overwhelming, the very presence of non-Communists threatened the nature of IKP as a party school; this proved an issue of importance through the end of 1922. Virtually from the opening of classes, on 1 September 1921, the administration took measures to drive out some of these few nonparty students. The IKP party cell repeatedly debated the issue with the administration and Pokrovskii over the course of the year. In a formal protest to the bureau of the party cell, the nonparty students claimed they were being excluded from student meetings in which institute affairs were discussed. Finally, the Orgburo reexamined the student body toward the end of 1922 and finalized a rule to exclude non–party members.9

A troika of Old Bolsheviks on the purge commission for IKP organized as part of the 1921 all-party purge, in a confidential report to Agitprop, give a clearer indication why the handful of nonparty students seemed to pose a threat greater than their numbers would imply. Of the more than eighty students in the first class at IKP, the report warned, only about ten were Bolsheviks with pre-October 1917 party rank. The rest, aside from the non-Communists, were either young Communists who had joined the Party in recent years, or former Mensheviks, Bundists, SRs, and Poale-Zionists. In other words, recent party recruits, especially former members of other socialist parties, dominated IKP’s first class and were clearly suspect. The report proposed a number of measures to combat the “accidental” and “variegated” composition of the institute. Chief among the recommendations was to form a standing IKP admissions committee, to reevaluate the student body periodically, and to admit only Communists with at least three years of party experience.10

This recommendation on the admissions committee was adopted, and the institute’s identity as a Bolshevik higher school was reinforced in 1922–23 through such measures as the imposition of an entrance requirement of two-year party membership, which was quickly upped to three years, then five years in 1924, and up to eight and ten years in certain departments by 1929. Agitprop also restricted the number of students who had been members of other parties, since “in the experience of the institute, we can report that former members of other parties . . . offer less security in terms of political and ideological reliability.”11

The severe shortage of qualified Bolshevik scholars, however, made it impossible at first to find enough teachers within the ranks of the Party, despite Pokrovskii’s lobbying efforts in the Central Committee to recruit overworked party leaders.12 The only alternative was to recruit nonparty teachers. Yet the party leadership at first viewed this solution with such trepidation that Lenin had to make die decision. In 1921 the question of allowing Marxists associated with the Mensheviks to teach was debated several times in the highest echelons of the Party, first in connection with Moscow University, then Sverdlov Communist University, and finally IKP.

In the spring of 1921 Pokrovskii wrote to Lenin about the department of social sciences (FON) at Moscow University. All the communist teachers they could find had already been enlisted. Would it be acceptable to recruit Mensheviks such as G. A. Groman, O. A. Ermanskii, N. I. Sukhanov, and Iu. O. Martov? Lenin responded: “I doubt it very much, better to hand the question over to the Politburo TsK.”13 While coming out against the widespread employment of Mensheviks in this way, Lenin took a different stance in relation to certain other individuals. In early 1921 the Orgburo ruled that the ex-Menshevik Liubov’ Aksel’rod-Ortodoks, a prominent Marxist philosopher and student of Plekhanov, could not teach at Sverdlov University. Under pressure from that school, Emel’ian laroslavskii, on behalf of the Orgburo, wrote to Lenin asking if Aksel’rod and the other prominent former Menshevik philosopher, Deborin, should be allowed to teach. Now Lenin wrote: “In my opinion definitely both. It will be useful, because they will support Marxism (if they start to agitate for Menshevism, we will catch them: OBSERVATION IMPERATIVE).” When IKP opened in September 1921, a separate decision came from the Politburo to allow the two philosophers to teach there.14 In this way some nonparty scholars were tolerated at the party schools. Pokrovskii bitterly complained that in the first few years not only nonparty Marxists but actual bourgeois professors had to be relied on to teach their “own grave-diggers,” the young red professors. In later years, however, nonparty teachers were still a noticeable presence; in 1929 they comprised seven out of sixty-nine teachers, or almost 10 percent of the faculty. It was characteristic of the period that beneath the loud hostility to non-Bolshevik Marxism and “bourgeois science” alike such compromises were made. It could not have been without Pokrovskii’s approval that even such decidedly non-Marxist figures like the historian of France, academician Evgenii V. Tarle, continued to make teaching appearances at party schools until anti-intelligentsia reprisals began with the Great Break.15

An equally enduring set of ambiguities, which would continue to prove divisive as the decade progressed, involved the selection of students. Who should be given entrée into the upper reaches of the Party? What should prove more important, scholarly capabilities, social origin, or party service? The higher party schools of NEP used a quota system (razverstka) in which places were reserved for candidates nominated by Central Committee departments and the regional party committees. In contrast to other party schools, however, this system was modified at IKP so that candidates also had to pass an academic examination, displaying their familiarity with reading lists of Marxist and Bolshevik classics and submitting written work. At the same time, the files of the IKP admissions committee (mandatnaia komissiia) show that party rank and record, not to mention recommendations and connections, often assumed greater importance than academic qualifications.16

There were a large number of examples of intervention to admit individual students—as on 12 September 1922 when Valentin N. Astrov, a future member of Bukharin’s entourage and later head of the “history of the Party” department, was admitted through the “intercession” of Agitprop. In September 1921 the administration, headed by Pokrovskii, took the decision to allow “highly qualified old party comrades to enter IKP as students outside the required norms.” Corruption of the system, in which well-connected students were admitted without testing, seems to have been an endemic problem. Although all higher education after the Revolution faced an endemic crisis of standards due to new access policies and low literacy levels of workers and party members, it is nonetheless startling that in this “postgraduate” center of advanced theory there were cases similar to the 1923 incident when three students were rejected because of “low level of literacy” (malogramotnost’), and “lack of data on ability to do scholarly work”; yet because of “party considerations” the final decision on two of the students was left up to the Central Committee.17 Even the seemingly axiomatic requirement of basic education could be overruled in the ongoing search for a truly red expert.

Party-political considerations in admissions became more formally represented in February 1923, when a Central Committee functionary received a permanent place on the admissions committee. Final decisions on all admissions were ratified by the Orgburo. By the second half of the 1920s, the Central Committee Secretariat was setting yearly admission policies on the number of students and their class backgrounds in advance; projections were then approved by the Orgburo. Agitprop almost certainly had a role in these decisions, since it was responsible for vetting nominees for admission from central party organizations.18

Within the space of a few years, then, IKP had moved from its 1921 call for applications — in which a majority of Communists had materialized seemingly only by sheer chance — to a complex system of cadre selection which involved the Central Committee departments, the IKP admission committee, and regulations and target figures attempting to govern the political and social profile of the student body. This shift in the early 1920s, in fact, comprised one part of a far broader phenomenon, the origin of the nomenklatura system of appointments that came to structure the entire Soviet political system.

The term nomenklatura was initially used to refer to three master lists of positions, which took shape between 1923 and 1925; each list specified appointments that were to be approved, according to their importance, by different echelons of the Central Committee from the Politburo down. As we have seen, the Orgburo approved IKP admissions. In addition, as part of this emerging centralized method of allocating appointments, all communist students at universities and party schools were “distributed” to positions upon graduation. What was distinctive about this development was not the central party organs’ deep involvement in the minutiae of personnel decisions; the Politburo had revealed its concern for this in its very first meeting in 1919.19 Rather, what emerged by the mid-1920s was the systematic codification of the prerogatives of the central party organs. Yet the evolution of admissions and appointments at IKP reveals that the integration of the red professoriat into this system was not a simple imposition. Rather, IKP as an institution needed to coordinate its actions with those organs in its admissions committee and many other ways.

Indeed, the reliance on centralized vetting of cadres must have seemed compelling to the IKP administration and admissions committee. The great hopes invested in the red expert, the sweep of political, social, and ideological attributes expected from the red professor, were blatantly at odds with the suspicions expressed about the first entering class. The same discrepancy between far-reaching expectations and what was frequently termed the “human material” at hand can be seen as a prime characteristic of the Party as a whole. This dissonance, above all, ensured that after 1921 IKP itself was as busy devising safeguards to improve its own composition as the top party organs were in regularizing their prerogatives of ratification.

Anti-Intellectual Intellectuals
and Anti-Professorial Professors

The work of the IKP admissions committee and the party organs produced a group of red professors that was increasingly elite in terms of its rank, connections, and prospects. This, coupled with the teaching appearances at the institute of party leaders such as Preobrazhenskii, Bukharin, Radek, Zinov’ev, and Iaroslavskii, not to mention foreign revolutionaries like the Hungarian Comintern official Bela Kun, quickly made the original intention of training university social scientists something of an anachronism. As Pokrovskii later put it to his seminar, “The Institute of Red Professors long ago outgrew the modest task of preparing professors of social sciences . . . . [It] prepares the political smena, a new ruling political generation for our party and for the proletariat in general.” The institute’s rising political importance took place in a context where party leaders warned repeatedly that the new cadres sent to higher education could lose their party and proletarian attributes, turn into a careerist caste of privileged specialists, and acquire all the old flaws of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia.20

It was perhaps inevitable that the character of IKP education would come to seem irtadequate and smacking of an “intelligentsia approach,” even to some of the Old Bolshevik founders. The early curriculum was notable for its highly theoretical bent and a reliance on a small group of Marxist classics. When a department of “soviet construction” (sovetskoe stroitel’stvo) was proposed in 1921, only three or four students were interested, and the idea was rejected. Early reading lists and study plans attest to the almost exclusive focus on academic high Marxism. The economics section, for example, would have been more accurately designated a department of political economy; courses on theory, historical materialism, and the history of capitalism were the backbone of the program, and a lone course on economic policy was offered in the third year.21

Not only could IKP be charged with favoring “theory” at the expense of “practice,” but it was all too easy to correlate this with a compromising social composition. In a “proletarian” party which during NEP included less than one percent of members with a higher education,22 the institute’s approximately 90 percent intelligentsia membership in 1921–24 was another indicator of a Bolshevik bastion of the elite, in a movement and regime that closely bound its self-image and legitimacy with its ostensibly proletarian and egalitarian nature. What is most interesting about the resulting charges of scholasticism, which became a leitmotif in IKP’s history, was that they seem to have come most persistently from the party scholars; students, and intellectuals themselves.

Anti-intellectualism had deep roots in Russian Social-Democracy, a movement in which intellectuals tried to spread a “proletarian” ideology to workers. The central Leninist notion of “professional revolutionary” opened the way for both groups to assume a new identity within the Party, yet still accorded a glorified role to those intellectuals who had joined the proletarian cause. By doing so, however, they broke with the “bourgeois intelligentsia” and all the values it was held to represent, making any new embrace of intellectual identity problematic. Thus a deep-seated current of anti-intellectualism flowed not only from Marxist heroicization of the proletarian, or from all the currents in the workers’ movement that revolted against intelligentsia tutelage, but also from the intellectuals’ own “hatred of the intellectual, curious, and cerebral side of themselves.”23 After 1917, the most ardent embrace of the anti-intellectual tradition within the Party came from “ultra-left” inner-party opposition groups, which bitterly indicted the party intelligentsia for bureaucratism and pro-specialist policies. At the heyday of party factionalism, the most important group involved in “intelligentsia-baiting” was the Workers’ Opposition in 1920–21. But oppositional groups before (such as the Military Opposition) and after (like the Workers’ Group of 1923) sounded interconnected anti-specialist, anti-bureaucratic, and anti-intelligentsia themes.24

After the suppression of the Workers’ Opposition, any critique implicating the party intelligentsia along with the bureaucracy as a new form of exploitation risked crossing the line into oppositionism. This situation held several consequences for IKP. It rendered an institution of party intellectuals particularly vulnerable, because it (as opposed to the social basis of the regime) could be safely criticized. It made it all the more incumbent on party intellectuals to prove they were not “torn from the working masses.” It was against this backdrop that deep currents of anti-intellectualism continued to well up from within the party intelligentsia itself. In short, the critique of “scholasticism” in the early 1920s in party academia might be seen as a distillation, typically put under a single deviationist rubric, of traits the party intelligentsia hated in itself. It stood for arid hair-splitting and impracticality, theory without practice, science without politics, cerebral erudition without action and commitment.

Red professors were an especially easy target within the Party for accusations of having a scholastic, academic, or intelligentsia approach. For example, when a group of IKP students defended the traditional organization of academic disciplines in higher party education against importing the interdisciplinary “complex method” that Narkompros pedagogues championed for the lower grades, Lenin’s wife Krupskaia, the chief proponent of the method, openly derided them in Pravda as “Marxist-Talmudists” and “Marxist professors, ignoring reality.” When even the word “professor” was derogatory, the red professors could only retort that vulgarizers underestimated the abilities of the working class, and this itself was an intelligentsia approach.25

Deep-seated goals of creating a new intelligentsia organically attached to the proletariat thus helped foster an identity crisis among party intellectuals, who found a way to bolster their revolutionary image by deriding values associated with intellectual work. Even top party theorists such as Bukharin and Preobrazhenskii found it necessary or expedient to criticize the “scholasticism” of the early IKP.26 If IKP’s own leading theoreticians would not defend the institute from charges of scholasticism, who would?

It was in the heat of polemics that the anti-intellectualism of the intellectuals became ingrained. In the Party’s leading theoretical journal, Bol’ shevik, the IKP graduate Ionov, a powerful figure in the publishing world who had become an impediment to the ambitious activists of the proletarian culture camp, brisded when accused of having spent revolutionary years in study. His accuser, the young leader of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), Averbakh, was of course implying that rejection of a militant class definition of culture must be attributable to an intelligentsia background. “For the information of comrade Averbakh,” the insulted IKP graduate replied, “[I] count in my party experience, in addition to study at IKP, the underground, prison, the death sentence, and work in the Red Army and Navy.“27

If as revolutionaries IKP intellectuals hastened to indict one another for possessing intelligentsia traits, as scholars they felt an equally pressing need to disassociate themselves from the “apolitical” neutrality associated with the nonparty professoriat. On this issue, rector Pokrovskii was in a unique position to influence the institute’s mission; of all the Old Bolshevik scholars he had the closest connection to prerevolutionary academia, having written his master’s dissertation at Moscow University under the famous historians Kliuchevskii and Vinogradov. His transition from the world of scholarship to the revolutionary movement and back may account both for his defense of academic rigor in the 1920s and for his particularly virulent rejection of the impartiality of bourgeois scholarship and a professorial identity. In one of the first, mild critiques of Pokrovskii’s historical schema, which dominated Marxist historiography in the 1920s and was pervaded by a reductive economic determinism, first-year IKP historian Nikolai L. Rubinshtein hesitantly rebuked his master for insufficient exploration of “ideology.” Pokrovskii retorted that if he were “only a professor” such criticism might be “devastating,” but “in my perhaps very humble way I am also a participant of the revolution.”28

Pokrovskii’s elevation of a revolutionary identity over the scholarly was at the crux of his “quarter century struggle with academic science” and his famous maxim that history is “politics projected onto the past.” In an extraordinary lecture on Lenin’s death in 1924 delivered at the Central Committee’s school for secretaries of uezd party committees, Pokrovskii interpreted the entire Bolshevik-Menshevik split as a dispute over Menshevik leader Martov’s desire to include “all professors and students,” in other words “the intelligentsia,” into the Party. If not for Lenin’s understanding of “the meaning of professors,” the Party would have turned into a “decrepit intelligentsia organization” that “would have never produced any kind of revolution.”29

Anti-intellectualism has been been embraced by intellectuals themselves in various times and places, but in this instance comprised an essential and strikingly overt part of the “proletarian” Party’s intellectual environment. This could not but deeply influence the red professors. In order to keep the students “close to the masses” the IKP administration and party cell overloaded them with agitation work in the factories, teaching work around Moscow, and a full schedule of party meetings. In 1926 Pokrovskii referred to four to seven hours per day being spent by red professors on non-IKP work.30

The taint of scholasticism rendered the institute in its first years not simply vulnerable but also unstable. The question of student admissions was linked to criticisms of “academicism,” since a proletarianized student body would doubtless be ·less academic; the curriculum was open to revision on the grounds that it was too removed from “reality.” Calls for a “struggle with the scholasticism that exists in communist universities” were among the resolutions passed at the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924.31

As far as the reform of the curriculum was concerned, however, there were two distinguishable sides to the struggle against scholasticism. One was a vocationalist impulse to train more practically oriented specialists, not abstract theorists; the other was a desire to force academic work into channels more immediately relevant to current politics. Although the program in political economy was criticized in 1924 for its “scholastic” lack of concern with contemporary Soviet economy, curriculum reforms during NEP never succeeded in making the institute more vocationalist, considering that as late as 1930 IKP graduated only twelve economists, all of them versed primarily in theory.32 Even as the theoretical orientation was never abandoned, it was constantly criticized as a scholastic escape from “socialist construction.” This curious phenomenon thus seems more connected to the internalized streak of anti-intellectualism of the Bolshevik theorists themselves than from either a homespun or technocratic vocationalism hostile to all abstraction. The bogey of scholasticism, with all its class connotations, provided a powerful incentive to forge an institutional mission and identity for the red expert that would wash away its stain.

Verification of the Red Expert:
Purges and Promotion Policies

IKP opened in September 1921 in the midst of a “re-registration” and “verification” of all party members; this was the first a11-party purge, approved by the Politburo on June 21 and scheduled to begin August 1. The timing of the two events in 1921 is not entirely accidental. IKP’s opening, the result of a planning process begun by top Bolshevik intellectuals in the Rotshtein commission in 1920, represented a fruition of the post–civil war opportunities to shift the Party’s focus to the third front; yet the shift to “peaceful reconstruction” also stimulated a post-victory decision to weed out careerists or aliens who had supposedly insinuated themselves into the Bolshevik side. The Politburo thus accepted Lenin’s proposal that purge commissions consist only of Old Bolsheviks of working class origin and adopted a recipe for a massive reduction of membership. Anyone “at all doubtful” should be purged; mistakes could be rectified by reinstatement later. In fact, a later TsKK report gave the results of the 1921 general purge as an enormous reduction of 30.3 percent of party members and candidates. The precarious nature of intelligentsia status within the Party is also indicated in the Politburo’s directives for the operation: workers in factories and demobilized Red Army soldiers in the countryside should be subjected to a “minimum of formalities”; but anyone with access to “privileges,” white-collar personnel (sluzhashchie), and all those who had belonged to other parties any time after October 1917 should be given special attention.33

IKP, a party institution born in the midst of this radical all-party prophylaxis, adopted the purge as its own basic tool for regulating the social, political, and intellectual activities within its walls. On 22 December 1921, Pokrovskii announced the formation of a Central Committee commission to review the composition of the institute; a representative of the bureau of IKP’s party cell was to join it. Models taken from the Party’s political life also became the regular method of academic evaluation. At IKP the administration in 1922–23 introduced an “academic purge” (akademicheskaia chistka) at the end of the school year. But because deficiencies in Marxist ideology were of course academic deficiencies, such purges were never solely or even primarily concerned with issues of academic ability and preparedness. In fact, there was never any pretense of limiting the academic purge to academics: instructions on the goals of these purges at IKP and other party schools consistently underlined that “party” and “social” considerations were as important as academic ones. The administration could also dismiss individual students outside the annual academic purge. In practice, it justified explusion with reference to both academic and political faults — or a marvelously laconic conflation of the two, “He will never make a red professor.”34

As a few high-profile student scandals preoccupied the institute in the first years, it also became established practice to resort to a kind of extraordinary purge to expel unwanted individuals above and beyond the general purges. In 1923, the last of the nonparty students, S. S. Ainzaft, a prolific author on pre-1905 Russian labor, was purged after the bureau of the party cell condemned him for “specifically. expressed Menshevik tendencies.” After the bureau revealed that Ainzaft had been “registered” as a suspect at the GPU, this decision was then ratified by the admissions committee and the administration. In similar actions, some others were expelled for being associated with the social-democratic Zionist party Poale-Zion.35 These individual cases were not officially called purges (chistki, proverki); the purge itself proved simply the most elaborate measure in an entire system of academic and political evaluation.

As the institute grew and the party cell bureau, the academic departments, and even student seminars played greater roles in these decisions, the purge itself became almost less significant than the constant process of evaluation. Advancing from the first class to the second, for example, was by no means automatic; it became the occasion for evaluation, promotion, or expulsion. Student groups from seminars and departments began to try to influence these decisions. Each group interested in making recommendations to the administration introduced evaluation procedures, to the point that’vote-taking—carrying with it the threat of a mark on one’s record or the recommendation of expulsion—was extended to each seminar, and even beyond that, to each major research paper (doklad) presented.36 In this way the threat of expulsion was built into the very fabric of life at the institute.

The “academic purge” of June 1923 marked a shift from a participatory to a “conspiratorial” method of organization. Cell leaders and the administration were determined not to repeat the experience of the previous year, in which all the students met in a kind of mass meeting to discuss the purge and wrangle over the results. An administrator told students gathered at a party meeting on 26 June: “Insofar as last year’s ‘democratic’ manner of conducting [the purge] discredited itself, we recognized the necessity of giving the purge a ‘non-democratic’ and conspiratorial character.” Opponents of the new methods — in which the purge commission alone gathered information from individuals, reached a decision and reported it to the bureau of the cell—charged that the commission was guilty of factionalism. But an attempt in the cell to put the new methods to a vote was itself voted down.37 With this anticlimax the academic purge lost the participatory character it originally possessed. The ordinary student would now take part only by denouncing another or defending himself.

In the resulting lists of purged students ratified by the IKP administration, with one-sentence justifications beside the names, we encounter the wide net of categories typically used to explain purges. Many were purged for various academic reasons; others were expelled as “passives,” insufficiently active in party or pedagogical work. There were also many political-ideological justifications — students purged for “non-Marxist tendencies” or being “politically alien to our party.”38 There is every reason, as we shall see in the cases of Trotskyists purged on various grounds, not to accept such categories as transparent. What they do show is how the red expert — not just in the abstract but in institutional practice — was open to evaluation on a gamut of academic, political, and ideological grounds. The 1923 purge also highlights the involvement of top party leaders in validating such evaluations, since in the wrangling that customarily followed the IKP bureau sent emissaries to Zinov’ev, Trotskii, Bukharin, Kuibyshev, and Molotov.39 The precedent of “conspiratorial” practices in 1923 would prove decisive the next year, when the institute was thrown into the limelight for its support for the Trotskyist opposition.

The Trotskyist Imagination and
the Watershed of 1924

An opposition centered around Lev Davydovich Trotskii, in leadership consisting of his own loyalists and former left oppositionists of various stripes, coalesced during the leadership power struggles of the interregnum after Lenin’s second stroke of March 1923 and began to make hesitant steps to garner broader support in the Party. The Trotskyist opposition has most frequently been analyzed in terms of its left program: rapid industrialization and economic planning, internationalism, anti-NEP themes. But the most explosive issue it raised, which subsumed even the largest policy stance, was the notion of the degeneration and “bureaucratization” of the Party’s “old guard.”40 This notion went to the heart of the Trotskyist opposition’s sociopolitical explanation of where the Party had gone astray, which the “ultra-left” tended to put in more radical terms of exploitation and a new bourgeoisie. But by throwing down a symbolic gauntlet to the “old guard,” the party leadership, Trotskii and his opposition momentarily inverted the far-reaching demands that Bolshevism’s high ideal of the professional revolutionary had placed on its followers — with a particular resonance for party students and red professors.

With his 1923 appeal to youth as the “barometer of the Party,” Trotskii gave permanent revolution, as it were, a generational twist. In this formulation, which became infamous in the Party, it was above all bureaucratization (which could corrupt even the “old guard”) that endangered revolutionary purity. The call for revolutionary renewal over bureaucratism was central to the Trotskyist imagination and was certainly more inspiring than the opposition’s political operations, which were rather easily outmaneuvered in 1923–24 by Stalin’s political machine.41

The appeal to youth suggested a more unabashedly affirmative image of communist students, red professors among them; instead of the smena being “declassed” by study, the leadership had been corrupted by power! This forbidden logic seems to have been what electrified many student supporters of the opposition at the universities and party schools. Party cells there became among the few politically important party organizations to openly vote for opposition platforms. Pravda reported in January 1924 that the opposition was supported by forty Moscow student cells, the Central Committee by thirty-two; but in fact the opposition may have claimed up to two-thirds of the student cells.42 At IKP in particular, Trotskii’s support may also have been due to the influence of leading oppositionists (Preobrazhenskii at the time taught the seminar on theoretical economics, and Radek a course on the history of German social democracy), and the fact that many IKP students were civil war veterans, to whom the organizer of the Red Army held a strong appeal.

As the “party discussion” got into full swing at the end of 1923, IKP and other party schools found themselves at the center of the storm of meetings and resolutions. On 16 December 1923 the triumvir Kamenev and the oppositionist Radek faced off at the institute, and in a highly charged meeting that lasted until 6 a.m. the next day, the students voted for the opposition’s resolution 83–47. “We consider extremely dangerous the full-fledged persecution of the ‘opposition,’” the resolution, proposed by Radek, declared, “and the tendentious character of the information in ‘Pravda’ on the course of the discussion.” A separate resolution specifically condemning Stalin for his articles in Pravda was passed 90 to 40.43

IKP’s condemnation of Stalin and Pravda assumes significance in light of the formal protest to the Politburo from Trotskii, Piatakov, and Radek claiming that Stalin’s proxy Nazaretian had been specially assigned to the Party’s main newspaper not just to slant coverage in the “party discussion” but to falsify published documents. In response, the Politburo majority opened a TsKK investigation, at the same time charging the opposition with distribution of secret documents such as the Declararion of the 46 to party cells and Red Army personnel.44

To many communist students, already sympathetic to the opposition’s program, the triumvirate’s methods of attack and denunciation had themselves become a major issue. At IKP on 2 December, Preobrazhenskii critiqued the internal party regime and sparked an earnest student discussion on the values of inner-party democracy (demokratizm), which could be easily contrasted to the “conspiratorial” dominance of the party cell bureau in local institutional affairs.45

The defeat of the opposition in spring of 1924 opened the door for the party majority drastically to change the order at the party schools and universities, which had proven such fertile ground for opposition support. This was done on several levels, which taken together would consitute a watershed in the history of party education and IKP, especially since the struggle had brought political tensions to new heights. “Supporters of the opposition and supporters of the TsK lived, studied, and worked completely separately,” one student recalled a few years later. “Former friends became enemies.”46 Soon after the “discussion” was ended, the Orgburo proposed and the Politburo approved on March 20 a purge (proverka) of the “nonproletarian” membership of the Party, to be carried out in “Soviet” (state) and VUZ (student) cells. This was to be designed as a “cleansing” (ochistki) of the Party of “elements socially alien, corrupted [razlozhivshikhsia] and estranged [otorvavshikhsia] from it.”47

The Politburo ratification of the 1924 purge reflected alarm at high levels for the broad support for the opposition at party schools and student cells. Stalin himself did not forget the votes of the party schools.48 Moreover, communist students, because they were widely seen as the backbone of the future party leadership and because they were believed to hold influence over worker opinion through their positions as agitators and instructors in workers’ cells and factories, were a political force more important than their already significant numbers; as a Politburo resolution noted on completion of the purge, they were “the future organizers and leaders of the party and the state.”49

Plans for the purge quickly followed the Politburo ruling. On 29 March 1924 a major meeting on the party schools was held at Agitprop’s subsection on propaganda, which directly oversaw the party schools and was headed by IKP teacher Konstantin A. Popov. With administrators from most of the major communist universities present, Agitprop planned in advance huge target numbers for each institution in the upcoming cell purges (to be carried out in conjunction with spring “academic” purges) as well as reduced 1924 admissions projections, in order drastically to cut the number of students at the schools. In the case of IKP, Pokrovskii and Agitprop’s Sergei I. Syrtsov were summoned on to the Central Committee Secretariat to discuss student cuts.50

The second measure to follow the defeat of the Trotskyist opposition was the ratification of a drastic reduction in higher education as a whole, which had been on the agenda since the introduction of so-called cost-accounting (khozraschet) in VUZy in 1922.51 The timing of these cuts in 1924, as well as Agitprop’s simultaneous planning of the purge and reduced admissions for party schools, indicates that the action ordered from the top was part of a restructuring of higher education in the wake of student support for the opposition.

Consider the plans for the universities, which were run by Narkompros. On 26 March 1924 Zinov’ev himself, senior member of the ruling triumvirate, made a highly unusual appearance at the Narkompros collegium, which then determined to cut the number of university students to prewar levels. On 10 April an order from the Politburo signed by Stalin gave concrete numbers: the contingent of students at RSFSR VUZy would be cut by 30,000, with an equivalent number in the union republics. A special commission chaired by Pokrovskii was ordered to discuss the plans for carrying this out at one of the next meetings of the Politburo.52 The report of this commission was approved by the Politburo on 24 April; it affirmed a cut of no less than 30,000 VUZ students “by means of the purge” (po chistke). The purge itself should be considered a test of “academic capability,” yet at the same time give “maximum advantage” to proletarian students. White-collar Soviet employees (sovsluzhashchie) and “offspring of the bourgeoisie” should be treated “especially harshly.”53 Here was a mandate to purge both “social aliens” and academic incompetents, with a tacit emphasis on student supporters of Trotskii. The typical necessity of balancing social, political, and other criteria, combined with the need felt even by communist administrators to protect their home institutions from decimation by purge commissions; it is hardly a surprise that the resulting purges of the party cells and student bodies of higher schools carried out from May to the fall of 1924 were highly chaotic.54

Chaotic implementation, however, does not capture the full meaning of the 1924 purge for party students. “Noise, cries and wails were completely inevitable,” TsKK chief Kuibyshev noted in his report to the Thirteenth Congress. He was not just putting on a brave face. If the purge was perceived as a reliable way to regulate party composition so that it was free of social aliens, then the resulting chaos was an unmitigated disaster; no wonder some Narkompros officials rebelliously opposed the purge, particularly because it turned their own domain upside down. But if it was intended or perceived as a draconian collective reprisal against the studenchestvo, then chaos was a byproduct of success, and never again did higher schools display the political “disloyalty” they had in 1923–24. Indeed, the final report accepted by the Politburo in October 1924 praised the great “instructive” character of the purge.55 Even the purge had come to be considered a didactic instrument.

Such target quotas set at the top were not unique to the 1924 purge; they were at least discussed during the planning of the next major purge in 1929. In that year, Iaroslavskii in top secret correspondence with the Politburo referred to advance guidelines that aimed for a reduction of less than 10 percent of party membership in general. On one occasion he also requested “orientation” figures for leading organizations in particular. By then, the purge was even more explicitly justified as an edifying process that would make the Party “harder” and more “monolithic.”56

A key legacy of the 1924 purge, therefore, was that it targeted certain groups but also acquired a deliberately indiscriminate character. At the IKP purge, conducted in June 1924 by an MKK commission, this was certainly the case.57 Pokrovksii, whom we have seen as an architect of the nationwide student purge in his role as Narkompros’s “point man” on higher education, found himself scrambling to protect certain students, protesting to the TsKK that IKP students were summarily dismissed and “the worth of a given comrade as a future professor was completely ignored.” Indeed, IKP students found themselves in a particularly vulnerable position. Since almost all the students were of intelligentsia background, almost anyone could be purged for social origin. “For the time being we can prepare professors only from intelligenty, and from workers we can only prepare students,” Pokrovskii maintained. His letter of protest indicates that 34 percent of IKP’s student population was purged, although the rector later recalled that as a personal favor Iaroslavskii, head of the TsKK, helped him reinstate several students.58 Students not dismissed from the Party were exiled to “mass” or “low-level” party work in the provinces. As Popov’s letter to the TsKK a year later shows, IKP’s admission committee would not readmit some of these students without proof in the form of recommendations from local party organs that they had indeed outlived their oppositionist tendencies. Toward the end of the MKK purge commission’s activities in June 1924, the Moscow party committee instructed the Khamovnicheskii Raikom, which had the institute in its jurisdiction, to observe the IKP cell more closely and to oversee reelections to the institute’s cell bureau.59

Finally, it can be established that Trotskii’s supporters were indeed targeted in the 1924 purge, although oppositionist tendencies were openly discussed as grounds for purge only in high-level Agitprop and Central Control Commission meetings. The oppositionist activities of purged IKP students, for example, were noted when considering their readmission to the institute a year later. To cite only one case, a student whom Popov in 1925 identified as an oppositionist (B. S. Borilin) had been officially purged in 1924 not as a Trotskii supporter but as “an alien element having nothing in common with the revolution.”60

The language of purge strove to be curt and businesslike, but it was also flexible and ambiguous. The records of the Central Control Commission troika set up to hear appeals from the purges of VUZ and soviet party cells contains documentation on the thousands of cases the troika reconsidered, all giving a brief biography and the original purge decision. To be sure, sometimes there were highly specific justifications for purge offered, such as those connected with violations of the norms of communist byt: “sexual relations with women of loose morals in the restaurant ‘Bar’ in January 1923.”61 But rationales tended toward vagueness, in keeping with the official silence on targeting Trotskii supporters. In the cells of higher educational institutions, students were purged as “ballast,” as “accidental elements” or simply as “alien.” One of the most ubiquitous categories, that of “alien element,” did not simply refer to ascribed class position, but was used interchangeably with “ideologically alieno”62

The setting of advanced quotas at the top, combined with the necessity to camouflage the charge of Trotskyism, held significant ramifications that went far beyond the immediate effects of the purge. Both these hallmarks of the purge process heightened the interchangeability of the social, ideological, political, and academic justifications for the purge itself.63 The red expert had been viewed from the start as a model in all, not just the last, of these realms; now, in the trauma of purge, the organicist inclination to fuse categories was given free reign in a major party-political operation.

This institutionalized fusion of categories held important implications for Soviet political culture and also comprised another legacy of the 1924 watershed for IKP. The party majority conjured up a potent brew of social, political, ideological, and academic deviations to account for the disloyalty of the students. The anti-Trotskii campaign had consistently portrayed the opposition as petty-bourgeois, so the time-honored connection between social origin and political deviation was the easiest link to make. Although Trotskii had made an appeal to students along generational lines, oppositionism was now painted as a clear-cut class issue; Trotskyism in the schools was due to their petty-bourgeois social composition.64 Petty-bourgeois Trotskyists were now tied to all the ideological faults of “scholasticism.” This provided further impetus for a modification of the curriculum. To put the icing on the cake, the students supposedly guilty of scholasticism were then portrayed as academically incompetent. Iaroslavskii began to tell stories of how the purge had revealed IKP students’ gross unfamiliarity with elementary Marxism. This entire amalgam — symbolically lumping social, political, ideological, and academic deficiencies — was welded together in a campaign conducted through the party cells and written into the party platform at the Thirteenth Party Congress.65 The “barometer of the party” was in disgrace. For participants in this political culture, 1924 drove in the message as never before: a politically loyal communist student was, or at least by all official party logic should also be, an orthodox Marxist, a pure proletarian, and even a good student.

Ambiguities of Social Engineering:
Dilemmas of the Proletarianization Drive, 1924–28

The doubts cast on IKP’s political loyalty and social composition in 1923–24 jolted the institution and provided the impetus for a far-reaching experiment in restructuring its social composition. This drive to modify the class background of the red expert at IKP was not unexpected; soon after the institute’s founding Pokrovskii had termed increased proletarian presence a long-term goal, and Narkompros’s rabfak administration had lobbied for it in 1923.66 But IKP took concrete action only in 1924, in tandem with a party-wide campaign. Proletarianization in this elite center of party higher education would compound the identity crisis of the party intellectuals.

The fetish with fixing in place reductive class categories, which became an organizational and theoretical enterprise of giant proportions in the 1920s, was part of the regime’s project of “classing” in Marxist terms an elusively shifting, layered postrevolutionary society.67 NEP was thus the great age of Marxist classification and record-keeping. But as the consequences of this enterprise noticeably shifted in 1924 to involve large-scale refabrication of the Party’s own social composition, nowhere were the dilemmas more acute than at IKP, the Party’s intelligentsia-dominated center for training the red expert. The upward march of percentages of workers became firmly entrenched at IKP between 1924–28 and could not be directly challenged in IKP debates; yet the very nature of IKP as a special center for high Marxism seemed to be put in jeopardy. No consensus was reached on how to square this next circle in the institute’s path; contradictory information was gathered and opposite recommendations pursued in a debate over recruitment and educational mission.

In announcing proletarianization, IKP once again followed the Party’s lead. At the Thirteenth Party Congress, a large-scale worker recruitment drive into the Party was approved, which upon Lenin’s death in January 1924 became known as the Lenin Levy. Between 1924 and 1926 this effectively doubled the Party’s membership with the admission of one-half million “production-line workers.” By the end of 1924, there were in Moscow alone 1,000 political literacy schools to train recruits for party membership. IKP itself founded a two-year preparatory section to train students classified as workers to move up to the regular departments; in admissions, the necessary party membership of three years was waived for new worker applicants, while it was raised to five years for all others. Before 1924, the student body at IKP had contained fewer than eight percent workers.68

The results of proletarianization at IKP ostensibly seemed clear: an upward curve in the number of working-class red professors. IKP statistics showed overall worker presence increasing to 21 percent in 1924, a little over 30 percent from 1925 to 1927, and up to 39.75 percent in 1928. The percentage of “white-collar” students declined in the same period from about 90 percent in 1921–23 to 55.38 percent in 1928. The old universities, under the influence of a professoriat much opposed to proletarianization, showed a more gradual rise from 17.8 percent workers in 1924–25 to 30.3 percent in 1928–29. Thus global statistics for higher education should not disguise that specifically party institutions like IKP, and certainly communist universities where the question of standards was not as sensitive, went much farther in carrying out proletarianization.69 When all higher education was set on breakneck proletarianization between 1928 and 1932, the precedent of five years of experience made it possibIe to argue that IKP was simpIy strengthening existing poIicies that had not yet been fully implemented.70

The triumphal upward march of percentages, however, disguised many ambiguities. IKP statistics did not indicate if these were “workers” by social origin or “class position,” meaning their occupation in 1917, or upon enrollment in the Party. But certainly they were not “from the bench,” since the IKP debate centered around what kind of workers should be admitted — those from the party apparat or from other educational institutions. Moreover, the malleability of the categories was underlined when the “intelligentsia” contingent referred to before 1924 was simply replaced retroactively with another term more standard in party statistics, white-collar employees.

The dilemmas of attempting to reconstruct the student body were dramatized after internal IKP studies revealed proletarian students (as well as those few of peasant background) received significantly worse grades than those classified as white-collar.71 A wide range of documents show that the decline from the elite academic ethos of 1921–24 had become a major issue at IKP by the mid-1920s. On 8 March 1926 the administration resolved to “consider it impossible to admit to the departments . . . persons who do not know literary Russian sufficiently.”72 Pokrovskii bluntly told his seminar: “I have to say, you do not know how to write Russian. After all, there have been a whole series of scandals.” Especially at the preparatory section, a number of internal reports attest to an educational crisis resulting from “a low level of literacy among a number of students.” By 1929, however, 48 percent of all IKP students in the institute itself had moved up from the preparatory section.73

The crisis of standards in party academia was compounded by the fact that the first students in the early 1920s had usually completed middle school or some higher education before the Revolution. At IKP, by the mid-1920s this reserve had run out. Moreover, other data the institute collected showed thirty nationalities at IKP in 1928. The four largest national groups were Russians (56.65 percent), Jews (19.19 percent), Latvians (5 percent), and Ukrainians (4.1 percent). Although one report made much of the “high level of preparation of Jews” for academic work, there was no attempt to correlate class and nationality with academic performance.74

Nonetheless, by the time two groups of students had entered the main institute from the preparatory section, in 1927–28, a major debate had erupted over the direction and purpose of the institute as a whole. Entrance examinations had been reinstated in higher education, so a discussion of standards was legitimized. This discussion revealed a preoccupation with allocating places among the four major sources of IKP recruitment: party politicians from party committees and the apparat (the so-called aktiv), rabfaks, communist universities, and “other” (non-party) institutions. AH but the last would have significant numbers of working-class party members; the issue of debate was therefore not proletarianization per se, but which group the institute should favor.

Agitprop’s Popov, an IKP teacher whose word in this debate obviously carried much weight, made no secret of his preference; he pressed for higher recruitment from party committees. He claimed this would not damage IKP’s scholarly mission: “It is completely false to say an orientation toward the party aktiv would require a lowering of standards for those matriculating: one must recognize that the partaktiv is already not so illiterate.” In other debates in 1927, some students seconded Popov’s championship of party officialdom, fearing that strict academic testing and requirements “would in fact close the door of IKP to workers and comrades in practical party work.”75

On the other side of the dispute, other teachers and students pleaded in the interests of IKP’s scholarly mission not to reject recruitment from the state sector “social-economic VUZy” altogether. But that impinged on the two other established constituencies, party students graduating from communist universities and from rabfaks. As opposing groups pushed their own agendas, the supporting data seemed contradictory at best. One internal study declared rabfak graduates did the worst academically, another declared communist university graduates were the least literate. The issues were further obscured through the use of a “masked” category of “other types of schools,” which apparently referred to nonparty institutions. In sum, no one openly questioned proletarianization, and even the results of discussion, seemingly a compromise, held an unmentioned ramification: it was resolved to increase allotments to party committees and communist universities, without weakening the commitment to the rabfaks. But this would seemingly come at the expense of the unmentioned “other” category, the graduates of nonparty institutions.76

IKP thus muddled through the crisis of standards that came in the wake of proletarianization. At the same time, the institution, and it seems above all the red professors themselves, were unwilling to reformulate IKP’s mission and to set their sights on anything less than their elite status as future leaders in the scholarly and theoretical world. At one point in 1927 the administration—perhaps recognizing that the preoccupation with advanced scholarship begun in 1921–24 was unrealistic in light of proletarianization and orientation toward the party aktiv—voted to change IKP’s name to “Higher School of Social Sciences.” This move, denoting a clear diminution of status for what had become much more than an ordinary higher school, was made without consulting students or the academic collegium. A storm of criticism apparently torpedoed the change: the philosophy department, for example, called the name change a capitulation to the bourgeois professoriat and a disarmament on the ideological front. In a flash, the pride of a self-conscious elite broke through: the philosophers warned about caving in to certain unnamed “workers in our party, who are enemies of training the professoriat through IKP.”77 The red professors would have their proletarian credentials, affiliations with the party aktiv, and their rightful place at the summit of Marxist scholarship too.

Social Science in a Different Key:
Curricular Reform and Red Scholarship

Who were these students who defended the claims of the red professoriat? A profile of IKP graduates and students gives some indication of the place of “red scholarship” in the Marxist social sciences of the 1920s. The total number of students accepted for study at IKP between 1921 and 1928 was 1,966; of these, 194 red professors were graduated between 1924 and 1928, in economics or political economy (88 graduates), philosophy (42), Russian history (32), history of the West (18), natural science (9), and law (5). The majority, over 58 percent, were listed as Communists who joined the Party between 1918 and 1920; another 35 percent joined the Party in 1917 or before. Like the vast majority of intellectuals of all kinds during NEP, most lived after graduation in Moscow or Leningrad. The administration’s report highlighted two main channels of employment after IKP: into party journals and newspapers (Pravda, Bol’ shevik, and Proletarskaia revoliutsiia were the ones named first) and “party-pedagogical work,” including at IKP itself, since in 1928 over half IKP’s faculty were graduates of the institute.78

A bibliography in Pokrovskii’s archive listing all the published works by IKP history students and graduates through 1928 gives some insights into “red scholarship.” IKP’s administration, following the institutional and conceptual practice of the Marxist social sciences in general in the 1920s, made a firm distinction between “science” (nauka) on the one hand, and the lower forms of popularized, instructional, disseminated Marxism — “political enlightenment” and writing on current political and ideological themes (referred to as “publicistics”) on the other. This is shown in the adminstration’s own scientific calculation that red professors by 1928 had published 559 “scientific articles” and 1468 “popular-publicistic” pieces, not counting newspaper articles and reviews.79

The bibliography shows that the two genres of publications were combined in the output of virtually every red professor. To take an example, Aron I. Gaister, student from 1922 to 1925, wrote one book for party propagandists on class differentiation in the countryside and another on “agriculture in capitalist Russia, 1861–1905.” In 1923 David A. Baevskii published a history of the workers’ press from 1878 to 1907, but he also wrote guides for party agitators. Some, like the Bukharinist Astrov, were much more heavily involved in publicistics, writing dozens of articles on Leninism and inner-party opposition; but Astrov also maintained a “scientific” research interest in German and Austrian Social-Democracy.80 The trend suggests that red professors in the 1920s cannot be understood outside their simultaneous roles as publicists and scholars, even though Marxist social science continued to conceptually demarcate scholarship and publicistics as separate genres of writing for certain types of journals and publications.

In the early IKP, this distinction was replicated in the realm of attitudes toward social science as well. For example, comments by teachers, faculty discussions, and grading of student work all emphasize the widespread conviction that true Marxist science, as opposed to mere political enlightenment, demanded a “critical approach to the material” and “an independence and originality of thought.”81 Red professors, however, were expected to shift effortlessly between both worlds, to be both students of social science and teachers of political enlightenment, scholars and popularizers. At the same time, IKP was subject to curriculum reform that attempted to contemporize study and fight scholasticism. This affected the boundaries, conceptual and institutional, between high Marxism, nauka, and the disseminated or publicistic forms of mass Marxism.

As early as 1923, Agitprop, with approval from the bureau of the IKP party cell, put together a blueprint to bring the institute closer to “the tasks of the present.” Every problem of political economy should, if possible, be “connected to the conditions of the epoch of proletarian dictatorship and capitalist encirclement.” The history department would study more contemporary topics, such as the civil war and the current situation. Philosophy would be less concerned with the history of philosophy and more engaged with “the struggle with idealism and deviations in Marxism.”82 Agitprop’s plan, which was originally put forward during the discussion of “scholasticism” by Konstantin Popov with the ardent support of Sverdlov University rector M. N. Liadov, undermined IKP’s earlier distinctions between high Marxism, nauka, and the more “mass” forms of disseminated social and political knowledge.83

In two meetings on IKP at Agitprop’s subsection on propaganda in October and November 1923, Pokrovskii and Preobrazhenskii turned out to be the most energetic critics of Popov and Liadov. When the Sverdlov University rector remarked that IKP was training “narrow specialists” and that all study must be based on “concrete reality,” Preobrazhenskii retorted that Liadov’s approach might be satisfactory for a school of political literacy, but for the institute it would be a “waste of time.” Pokrovskii’s defense of a historical approach and broad general preparation resulted in some compromise phrases on “deep theoretical knowledge” in the final Agitprop document.84 Nevertheless, the 1923 discussion launched a lengthy process of reform of the IKP academic program.

In this process Pokrovskii played a complex and often contradictory role in relation to scholarship at the institute. In his 1923 “theses,” Pokrovskii emphasized that the red professor must be versed in both Marx and his “critics,” but in the next breath railed against false objectivity divorced from the goals of the Party. By 1928 the former student of Kliuchevskii was complaining that his seminar alone at the institute made the attempt to impart familiarity with non-Marxist literature.85 As rector, however, Pokrovskii was not loathe to modify his convictions when political considerations intruded. Pokrovskii at first defended the intelligentsia composition of the early IKP, noting that “a microscope is a microscope, whether a proletarian or a bourgeois looks into it, and what they will find there depends on who knows how to look better.” But after 1924, the rector quickly shed his reluctance to proletarianize the institute; he also became a promoter of the extension of Marxism into natural science when this moved up on the agenda of party scholarship, and IKP students began to write dissertations on topics such as “Materialism and Idealism in Theoretical Chemistry.”86 A microscope, apparenrly, was no longer just a microscope.

Curriculum reform after 1923 attempted to make the “scientific” work more contemporary and more engaged with the Party’s “current tasks.” Red historiography, for example, treats no topic before the Decembrist revolt of 1825; and the vast bulk of history-writing concerns a small cluster of “revolutionary” subjects (history of socialism, the workers’ movement, and the Revolution itself) in the two decades before 1917.87 In 1926 Pokrovskii noted statements at a conference of university rectors “that IKP produces incompetent professors, and therefore the Institute of Red Professors is totally unneeded.” While strongly defending IKP’s record, the historian nevertheless could not help remarking that the red professors were “undereducated” (nedouchkami), and came out with the extraordinary statement: “If you ask me whether one could appoint one of my students [from IKP] to a kafedra of Russian history, then I will say—no, impossible, because they do not know Russian history as a whole. . . . [When they arrive at IKP] they do not know a single foreign language.”88 This remark, it needs to be recalled, came from the driving force fighting for the “communization” of all social science teaching in higher education.

More relevant did not necessarily mean more practical; it meant demands on academic work were directed at tying it, like publicistics naturally were, to the “current situation” and party tasks articulated outside the institute. Several broad trends facilitated this attempt. The most important was the inauguration at IKP of new disciplines — Leninism in 1925 and the history of the Party in 1927—that were themselves prominent fronts in ongoing party struggles. Especially influential in “contemporizing” the curriculum was the advent of Leninism as a discipline. High-level intra-agency commissions formed after Lenin’s death met in the attempt systematically to inject Leninism into the academic programs of all higher educational institutions. The subject of Leninism, an elastic field memorializing Lenin’s contribution to Marxism, the Party, and the Revolution, therefore saturated curricula at a time when virtually every intellectual and political tendency in the party vied with its opponents by claiming the mantle of orthodox Leninism. It reached the point that the dean of the preparatory section complained in 1927 that the very same material was being repeated in political economy, Marxist philosophy, and Leninism.89

Both curriculum reform and the red professors’ own deep involvement in publicistics and political enlightenment, which offered political relevance and ties to the masses, formed the background against which social science at IKP was instrumentalized (to use an expression common at the time) as a weapon of struggle. The activity of the red professors became a many-fronted struggle that was theorized in journals and books and acted out in seminars and meetings; occasionally it even bordered on a physical brawl. The confrontation with the United Opposition in 1927 was played out at IKP, according to one witness, when oppositionist Karl Radek tried to speak at an IKP forum and was literally dragged away from the podium.90

On Agit-trials and Theory Seminars:
Drama and Ritual in Unmasking Deviance

“The kruzhok is an arena—in which [students] comport themselves sometimes like gladiators, sometimes like young cocks,” a Sverdlov University student wrote in 1924. “The kruzhok is an arena–where you study the use of weapons to repel attack at every crossroad of life.”91 We have already seen the pivotal importance of the kruzhok at Sverdlov University. At IKP, the counterpart to the Sverdlovian kruzhok was the seminar, but images of spectacles and sports of combat, of cockfights and gladiators apply equally well to it. IKP’s theory seminars did not occur in a splendid Marxist-Leninist isolation, but formed a distinctive part of broader Bolshevik and early Soviet political culture. By mimicking in seminar the conventions of the Party, which itself was at the same time deeply enmeshed in developing forums in politics and culture for influencing and styling group behavior, the young red professors affirmed their party and revolutionary (rather than scholastic) commitment.

The seminars’ activity was not explicitly conceived as ritual, insofar as that implies high degree of established ceremony and comprehension of the rite by initiates; nor was it a spectacle that dramatized material for the stage (intsenirovka), which implies a script. Nevertheless, elements of both ritual and drama made their way into what were after all public performances, whose actors had grown up in a revolutionary culture in which the need to devise distinct social practices, rites, and novel methods of instruction had assumed singular importance. The new cultural practices of the October Revolution, after having developed in an exuberant, often chaotic and heterodox environment exemplified by the mass festivals of the civil war period, had given way to the increasingly scripted methods and canons of NEP. Nothing indicates the Bolshevik struggle to master spontaneity and yet preserve revolutionary values in the new culture more than what became the standard practice of planting the crowds at public celebrations with “cells of fomenters” whose “premeditated enthusiasm would inspire spontaneous emotion.”92 As this suggests, one of the most relevant axes around which the emerging Soviet political culture can be analyzed is the interplay between two of its major values, revolutionary enthusiasm and scripted Bolshevik discipline. Sometimes the two clashed, at others they reinforced one another. IKP, as a self-consciously revolutionary and Bolshevik institution, incorporated this basic tension.

The conventions of “political enlightenment work,” which IKP students were as party instructors expected to have assimilated, thus helped shape the character of academic seminars, which turned into performances that were transcribed and recorded for the higher authorities; and in this way IKP’s cognitive activity, in ways perhaps only sensed by its participants as they learned their lessons, comprised a vital part of the broader revolutionary political culture, blending revolutionary activism with increasingly organized ritual. These assertions will be brought out through a substantial historical detour into the evolution of a surprisingly related form of revolutionary culture, the agitational trial. The links with the Bolshevik political culture of the red professors will presently become apparent.

Theater was, in Clark’s memorable phrase, the “cradle of Soviet culture.” Avant-garde theater activists, in her words, were before 1917 developing theater as a “construct for a totalizing experience” to overcome alienation and transform humanity. When these currents meshed in revolution with a Bolshevik embrace of theater as an educational and propagandistic device, theater became the queen of the revolutionary arts.93 It might be added: as Bolshevik politics itself acquired an increasingly didactic function and scripted character the revolutionary polity itself became more theatrical. One of the least known genres in the flowering of propaganda theater after October, agit-trials were mass spectaeles, amateur theatricals, realist revolutionary drama, and Soviet rituals. They were variously referred to as agit-trials, model trials, sanitation trials, polit-trials (politsudy), and show trials (pokazatel’nye sudy). The practice of staging mock trials with political or instructional themes arose during the civil war in the Red Army. With possible roots as diverse as mock trials used for decades in the Russian bar, prerevolutionary popular cultural preoccupation with courtroom disputations, and peasant popular justice (samosud), the agit-trial is one of the best illustrations of how an indigenous, popular revolutionary practice coexisted with increasingly organized attempts to standardize it in the 1920s. It marks the space in which forms of Soviet popular culture with diverse Russian roots overlapped with Bolshevik political enlightenment in a concern with revealed guilt.94

Early agit-trials placed great emphasis on improvisation, so much so that we have little documentation on the genre’s early days during the civil war. Even so, the setting was so realistic and the tensions so intense that those acting out roles (often of a counterrevolutionary or class enemy) at times became alarmed for their own safety.95 Early mass spectaeles, such as the 1920 trial of Baron Vrangel’ in which 10,000 Red Army soldiers participated, gave way to what one scholar calls the “scripted” mock trial of NEP. Theorists of propaganda theater championed the “illusion of reality” created by replication of the courtroom and juridical procedure. Stereotypical characters were easily recognizable by their emblematic names and essentialized class behavior. In these dramas, the kulak was always greedy and the proletarian hungry for enlightenment.96

By the 1920s, then, the agit-trial, from its Coots in the rough-and-ready mass meetings of red partisans, became an official Soviet ritual of the “political enlightenment” repertoire in such settings as workers’ clubs, people’s courts, the Red Army, and the Cheka. From a popular “new method,” able to adapt well to political themes because it had elements both of spontaneous game and scripted theater, the balance tilted increasingly toward the latter, as attempts at standardization such as publishing model trials proliferated.97 Like other forms of propagandistic dramatization such as the “living newspaper,” the agit-trial also became a regular feature of revolutionary theater, as drama groups, including those in universities and party schools around the country, used the trials as vehicles for didactic plays with political themes. Along with mass holidays, meetings, lectures, and spectacles, Glavpolitprosvet recommended agit-trials in 1921 as a standard activity for clubs in higher educational institutions for the benefit of those institutions seeking funding.98

Here was drama as revolutionary ritual par exellence. The nature of the political and the revolutionary proved elastic, as the trials were adapted for different audiences and purposes. In the 1920s, major types of trials concerned counterrevolutionaries and party-political themes; public health and sanitary knowledge; antireligous propaganda; and production and lifestyle issues in factory and countryside. Even concepts like pornography or policies like NEP could be put on trial. The “old ways” were judged, as was a peasant krasnoarmeets accused of infecting his wife with gonorrhea. The fact that specialists such as public health officials and agronomists wrote many of the agit-trials may help explain the genre’s self-conscious anti-aestheticism, but the point of this propaganda realisan was to depict idealized political behavior, that is, behavior not as it was, but as it should be.99 The agit-trial showed its connections to the avant-garde and early revolutionary theater through its primary insistance on audience participation. The agit-trial on the one hand forced that much-anticipated leap past the proscenium arch by electing audience members to the jury and asking the entire audience to render its verdict. Yet the scripted Soviet culture cultivated convention to the degree that the trials’ outcome and participants’ roles were “overdetermined.” Witnesses were planted in the audience, the equivalents of cells of fomenters in a sea of threatening spontaneity.100

Students were initiated into the “theatricalized life” of Soviet political culture not only through their contact with political enlightenment work and clubs.101 Ar the “real” show trial of the SR Party in 1922, Sverdlov students and young Communists reportedly rehearsed for four hours before they rallied at the train station against foreign socialist dignitaries, allowed in to the country as defense representatives for the accused SRs; in front of the courthouse, the students were mobilized to chant “death to the SRs!” As elements of ritualistic theater in the trial of the SRs were immediately obvious to the well-informed, Menshevik commentators at the time referred to a “ritual affair” and a “scripted” or “staged” tria1.102 Life imitated art; political life in these years was linked to the cultural forms and rituals of political enlightenment by many threads.

The connection between the agit-trial and IKP seminars is not remote. One of the most striking of the red professors’ conventions in theoretical and political discussions was the practice known as “working [somebody] over” (prorabatyvat’)—to bombard someone with intensive criticism from many sides, not unlike the “relentless questioning” of prosecutor and judge in the agit-trial.103 Such interrogation was also connected to the unwritten rules governing denunciation, which frequently took the form of presenting evidence, above all compromising information from the biography of the accused: “I have knowledge that Torner wavered for a long time after the Fourteenth Party Congress . . . We all know how he approached the question of the dictatorship of the party and evaluated the social forces of the Chinese revolution. It is said that Torner spoke out previously against Lenin’s brochure ‘An Infantile Disorder,’ and recently asserted that if Lenin were alive, he would still reject it.”104 In academic debates, criticisms centered on “methodology,” but this, like categories used in the purges, was an umbrella term under which political, academic, and ideological faults could be found. In the group dynamics of the seminar or meeting, it was not uncommon for the seminar leader (starosta) to take charge of exposing others’ methodological mistakes. In essence, he acted as prosecutor and judge. In the department of natural science in 1926 and 1927, for example, Vasilii N. Slepkov, the brother of the historian Aleksandr Nikolaevich, played such a role. During this period he introduced a barrage of motions labeling fellow students “methodologically unsatisfactory,” “disloyal” to the seminar, “methodologically incorrect,” and perpetrators of “blunders from a methodological point of view.” That this did not destroy the work of the seminar, but rather was seen as a legitimate function, is suggested by the fact that the watchdog was unanimously elected dean (dekan) of the natural science department in 1927.105

The distinctiveness of the political culture did not merely lie in the attack on ideological and political deviation — this had been part of Bolshevism long before. But the elevation of a process of struggle to make revelation of guilt the defining element of group relations even among comrades was indeed an innovation; the “working over,” while practiced among party scholars elsewhere, was far more distinctive of the younger generation, and was linked to the ethos of IKP in particular. For example, Pokrovskii later claimed he had been “worked over” at IKP several times since 1924, and by temperament he was inclined to welcome the process; also, he was too powerful to be really stung at IKP during the 1920s. Pokrovskii noted that other intellectuals from the older generation, however, took a less favorable attitude to the custom: “How dare some illiterate whipper-snappers [mal’ chishkti] criticize me, an Old Bolshevik?”106

Working somebody over was not a staged performance in the same way as a scripted or theatrically staged agit-trial: its outcome was not always predictable. Nonetheless, “scripted” elements could be easily incorporated, from campaigns, texts, or the Party’s current arsenal of deviations. Trotskii, the object of organized attack in 1927 on the intensely factional topic of the Chinese Revolution, likened the discussion in the IKP cell to a pelting with chunks of garbage.107 It is possible the deliberately coarse heckling style favored by the Stalin faction in confrontations with the opposition after the mid-1920s served as a model. Like the purge, another political ritual, “working over” assumed stature as process rather than for the particular accusations employed.

The culture of combat led to something seemingly nonexistent in the first few years of the institute — denunciations and ideological evaluations of the faculty. But such risky attacks were unlikely to be random; they provided opportunity for high-level machinations on the part of prominent party theorists. IKP students became embroiled in the classic political maneuver of creating a groundswell of criticism “from below” against one’s enemies. For example, the Hungarian émigré Aleksandr I. Var’iash, who taught in the natural science department, was a prominent “mechanist” philosopher who opposed the primacy the Deborin school accorded Hegelian dialectics. In 1926, as the debate between mechanists and Deborin’s dialecticians heated up, Deborin moved to consolidate control at IKP and on the editorial boards of key journals. At the same time, the natural science students unanimously denounced Var’iash for combining “Marxism with a range of bourgeois theories”; the teacher was removed.108

But revolutionary zeal, that other axis of the political culture, was also clearly expressed in the seminars. The genuine explosiveness of student criticism itself is suggested by the fact that, like the agit-trial before it, there were attempts to standardize and control the IKP seminars. The administration, not formally bound to accept the votes of student groups, attempted to regulate the format of the student discussions by introducing standard categories for student evaluations, such as “activism” and “ability to do scientific work.” There is also evidence that members of the administration at times tried to curtail the increasing power of the student meetings.109 But could revolutionary zeal and calculated discipline really be distinguished? A purged Trotskyist in 1927, charging that his expulsion for academic incompetence was politically motivated, taunted his colleagues: “You seem to be pursuing a revolutionary cause, but in actual fact you are only fulfilling the directives of the higher organs.”110

Working over, denunciation, and attack were among the most stylized elements of interaction in a complex field of play. Far more common than the extraordinary measure of working over was alliance-building and minor sniping; in case of a deadlocked seminar, a party cell bureau representative could be brought in. Two other hallmarks of the seminars stand out: the constancy of evaluation and the adversarial nature of the process. The seminar votes in fact were passed on to the administration, which could decide to purge a student, and this explains the air of grave ceremony involved in the seminar gathering. Constant evaluation led to an extraordinarily high degree of mutual scrutiny, and everyone seemed to keep track of the precise wording of the negative evaluations from the previous year. The seminars’ collective evaluations, the original purpose for recording the meetings, grew out of the ubiquity of evaluation established to monitor the red expert; in this sense the political culture adapted to institutional structures and practices of purge and promotion.111

The constant evaluation contributed to the second aspect, the intensity and pervasiveness of struggle. Consider this excerpt, by no means atypical, from the record of a 1925 meeting of philosophy students:

Considered: A statement on the necessity of presenting the administration with an evaluation of the report of comrade Sokolov (on Kant). Proposal of Stoliarov: “To consider that Sokolov worked through a great deal of material in the report, but that from the perspective of the methodological basis of the report it does not entirely answer the demands of the Marxist method.” First amendment of comrade Dmitriev: cross out the word “entirely.” Additional amendment of comrade Dmitriev: Taking into account the entire past work of comrade Sokolov at IKP, consider it expedient to expel him from the Institute.112

It is obvious that the form, purpose, and language of this gathering of philosophers was adopted directly from the model of the party cell meeting in political life. Just as the agit-trial ended with the indictment and reading of the sentence, so the seminars ended in the passing of the resolution.

It has been argued that “culture and, in the case in point, scholarly or academic culture, is a common code enabling all those possessing that code to . . . express the same meaningful intention through the same words, the same behaviour patterns and the same works.”113 The most striking aspect of IKP’s academic culture as reflected in the seminars is that it cannot be separated from its political culture. In the most immediate sense of its practices and distinctive customs, IKP’s seminars, like Sverdlov’s kruzhki, were literally an extension of party politics.

It is fascinating to note that in the course of the 1920s as IKP was developing its combative ethos in its seminars, the Moscow party schools for Chinese cadres, KUTV and Sun-Yat Sen University, were also refining their own “struggle-criticism” and “study-criticism sessions,” which like the IKP seminars bore a distinct resemblance to party cell meetings. Responding to the particular cultural heritage of the Chinese Communists, they were designed to break down traditions of saving face, group harmony, and exaggerated respect for authority; they prefigured what later became principal Chinese communist techniques for influencing group behavior.114 In Soviet Russia, the early forms of revolutionary political culture were also being codified into official, country-wide methods as well. “Working over” in the IKP style was followed by the “criticism/self-criticism” campaign of 1928 and consolidated into an official Stalin-era form. Agit-trials were complemented and later supplanted by the “real-life drama” of “genuine” show trials: didactic and educational, displaying markedly more scripted qualities by the end of the 1920s, featuring obligatory mass participation and audience plants, and sharing with agit-trials “a fluid boundary between stage and life.”115

As one link in the evolution of IKP’s own criticism techniques, and indeed a moment of triumph for them, we can note a pivotal episode when Stalin personally authorized perhaps the most far-reaching “working over” by IKP militants of the Great Break generation. On 9 December 1930 Stalin personally met with the party cell of IKP Philosophy. The Deborin School, vying with the mechanists for most of the 1920s, had in 1929–30 emerged victorious; but now Stalin urged the IKP philosophers “to beat [the Deborin school] in all directions, to beat [them] in places where they have not been beaten before.” The result was that Deborinism was targeted as “Menshevizing idealism,” which in several accounts ultimately paved the way for the young IKP philosophers to themselves become academicians, help crown Stalin as Lenin’s heir in philosophy, and contribute to the transformation of Marxist-Leninist philosophy into a kind of watchdog metadiscipline.116 The political authorization in this case, the organized or scripted element, actually comprised a directive to foment revolutionary zeal.

My concern in relaying this episode is not to indulge the oversimplified conclusion that IKP’s pre-1929 culture of attack was exclusively Stalinist. Stalin in 1930, no less than Deborin in 1926, found it expedient to manipulate conventions already prevalent in party academic life, even if his manipulations by that time had the power to affect those conventions. IKP in the 1920s entrenched a kind of political-academic combat that was not unique to this institution, but which in the scholarly world was most developed there because of a distinctively militant, red professor ethos. This ethos was rooted in the group dynamics of its seminars, which centered around a process of exposing deviance, the conventions of which bore striking resemblance to other revolutionary rituals and Bolshevik cultural forms. Two major ways in which these conventions spread can be suggested: outward, to the nonparty academic community, and inward, to affect Marxism-Leninism itself.

Krementsov’s important discussion of rhetoric and rituals of Soviet science identifies a number of adaptations that the nonparty scholarly community made to imitate “Bolshevik lexicon and style” as well as specific political group activities. Focusing on the behavioral sciences, but allowing that he could be writing about any discipline, he traces the rise from the 1920s to the 1930s of a style of “ideological” criticism in professional critical literature, filled with martial rhetoric and primarily concerned with exposing dissent in a scholarly enemy. He also shows how certain kinds of ritualistic party activities — from criticism/self-criticism to jubilee meetings — took hold as a symbolic vehicle for scholars to demonstrate devotion.117 As Krementsov implicitly recognizes, as these practices were incorporated into academia, they represented the norms not simply of the Party per se, but of party scholarship, developed in communist academic institutions.

Marxist social science itself, or more precisely Soviet Marxism as an intellectual system, evolved in tandem with the political culture and ingrained rituals of group behavior. After all, cognitive activity could not be kept discrete from the broader culture in which it was created, especially since that culture, as suggested most strongly in the case of IKP’s mission to create the red expert, was explicitly concerned with breaking down barriers among the political, the social, and the academic.

In classical Marxist analysis, stripping away ideology to reveal underlying class interest was a central methodological device; yet the situation of the Bolshevik Party in the 1920s dictated a more pervasive and consequential urge to unmask. Soviet Marxism developed in a social order in which the imposition of “proletarian” or “class alien” affiliations onto a shifting, ambiguous social structure led to constant masking and unmasking of social identity.118 In political life, especially in the cases of the Trotskyist and United Oppositions, the Party faced a struggle not just to condemn oppositionists declaring themselves to be the true orthodox Leninists but to reveal hidden oppositionists driven underground. Even more ominous, to escape reprisals oppositionists acted to all outward appearances the parts of loyal party members.119

Against this broader background, and in the context of an academic culture rooted in the party struggle, scholarly and theoretical writings adopted specific methodologies of attack analogous to the methods deployed in the group dynamics of the seminar. For example, in January 1928 Bukharin’s right-hand man, the IKP graduate and teacher Aleksandr Slepkov, wrote an article in the Party’s theoretical journal called “Weapons of Victory.” Ostensibly an essay on the history of the Cheka/GPU, arguing that the secret police was justified in preserving “extraordinary measures” during NEP, the centerpiece of the article was a denunciation of academician Tarle. Following the same conventions of attack we have seen in the seminars, the article unveiled compromising evidence from Tarle’s past: the historian’s 1918 collection of documents on French revolutionary terror was designed to prove the dangers of violence to revolution and thus, it was implied, discredit the secret police.120 If Slepkov’s technique was standard, the potential repercussions were unusually grave.

It was not just the particular methods of the political culture, however, that were homologous in the group seminars and the theoretical journals; so was the very centrality of the process of struggle and revealing disguised deviation. A paper from an IKP philosophy student written in the 1927–28 academic year, to cite but one example from a mode of thought, argued that “contemporary revisionism is marked by the fact that it calls itself orthodox, even more than that, the most orthodox Marxism.”121 The two organizing principIes of this crystallizing intellectual style, struggle and the revelation of deviation, could at some point crowd out all other substance. The reponse of one psychologist, V. M. Borovskii, to a red professor describes this phenomenon best:

Maliarov is trying to undertake the “pepper” style that Marx, Engels, and Lenin used in their polemical writings. But . . . their “pepper” was a tasty addition to a substantial meal. It is said that in bad cafes pepper is used to flavor rotten meat. Maliarov did an even simpler thing: he feeds you with pepper alone, without any meat or other food . . . It is not criticism, it is a fireworks show.122

The closing reference to a public display or performance also provides a telling clue to the tight links between political culture and intellectual style.

Party political commentary, as well, became a showcase for techniques of unmasking the “true” nature of the enemy, usually the opposite of what it declared itself to be. Movements disguising themselves as leftist were in reality rightist: Slepkov, a member of Bukharin’s entourage and the IKP graduate who became the most prominent polemicist against the Trotskii and United Oppositions in the central party press, argued in 1924 that the Trotskyist opposition may have started out as “left,” but soon found an ideological fusion with “right opportunist” tendencies.123 In early 1928, he developed a similar argument to show that the Left Opposition had been transmuted into left Social-Democracy; therefore, Trotskyists masquerading as Bolsheviks were really excommunist renegades even more dangerous than old, open opportunists.124 At about the same time, another author in the same journal attempted to describe contemporary political analysis: “Rightists call leftists right, and leftists call rightists left in quotation marks; ‘rightist rights’ and ‘leftist lefts,’ ‘rightist lefts’ and ‘leftist rights’ — in truth, where is the line?” In this article, published months before the mst hint of the Stalin-Bukharin conflict that unmasked the “Right Opposition” within the Party, and in fact printed in the theoretical journal dominated by Bukharin and his entourage of red professors, the author employed the convention of “dialectically” inventing a deviation. Since right deviation was objectively more dangerous at the given moment, he concluded, the left deviation “inevitably is transformed into the right deviation” and becomes “a singular expression of the right danger.”125 Unmasking had become an intellectual game; soon it would become high political drama.

The Invented Opposition:
IKP and the Revelation of the “Right Danger”

Because of its association with Bukharin when he was condemned as the head of a “right deviation,” IKP in virtually all Western accounts has been characterized as a bastion of the Right in 1928–29.126 But this not only misconstrues events at IKP itself, but conflates high-level factional struggle in the leadership with a related but distinct development, the political-ideological creation of a Right Opposition.

The trio of party leaders Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomskii, swiftly out-maneuvered by the Stalin majority in 1928 and branded as ringleaders of a right deviation, obviously conceived of themselves neither as rightists nor as deviationists; they were revealed as such. The political tendency they represented neither acted nor desired to act as an opposition; it was in the process of its defeat unmasked as such.127 The “right deviation” in 1928–29 thus assumed perhaps its greatest importance, not in the political challenge its reluctant leader-victims made to the Stalin group in the high-level power struggle, but in precipitating a party-wide shift in the political culture. It marked a climax of several trends growing out of party political culture that we have seen affecting intellectual and ideological life as well: the eclipse of “conscious” opposition by the shadow world of masked dissent; the emerging centrality of the unmasking itself as process; and the diffusion of the “omnipresent conspiracy” to the point where hidden rightists were both everywhere and nowhere. Anyone familiar with party writings in 1928–29 will recognize the climate that led to a sharp increase in conspiratorial thinking, one casting suspicions on the ostensibly loyal and orthodox in a variety of contexts too wide to catalog here. Suffice it to say that the preoccupation with “double-dealing” dates to this period.128

The invention of opposition was, however, hardly a novel phenomenon in party life. To cite the most relevant precedent, a major preoccupation of the ruling triumvirate in 1924 was to create a doctrine labeled Trotskyism and depict it as utterly divorced from Leninism. When Zinov’ev and Kamenev joined Trotskii in the United Opposition, according to Trotskii’s interesting 1927 explanation, Zinov’ev explained to his erstwhile enemy: “There was a struggle for power. The whole art consisted of linking old disagreements with new questions. For this purpose ‘Trotskyism’ came into being.” But the power of endlessly reiterated political myths was such that after several years even some of their inventors began to believe them. At a meeting of Trotskii and Zinov’ ev supporters at Kamenev’s apartment, two Leningraders began to repeat the standard litany of Trotskyist deviations (underestimation of the peasantry, etc.) reportedly prompting Zinov’ev to exclaim: “What are you doing mixing yourselves up like that! After all we ourselves thought up this ‘Trotskyism!’” Although Trotskii himself claimed to have understood long. before that the triumvirate had striven deliberately to create Trotskyism, he registered the profound impression the incident had made upon him and his comrades.129

The difference between 1924 and 1928, however, was that while the creation of a deviation served as a political weapon in both cases, Trotskii and his followers were nonetheless willing and able to be an opposition; Bukharin and his fellow “rightists” only maneuvered as a group within the ruling leadership. While Trotskii supporters actively distributed platforms and documents in 1924 to student party cells, those branded as “rightists” bent over backward not to break party discipline and never brought the struggle to the rank and file even in Moscow.130

The “right danger,” as we saw in the rhetoric of the future “rightist” Slepkov, had entered into the party lexicon well before the “right deviation.”131 The “whole art” for Stalin in 1928–29 was to link the diffuse danger most frequently associated with specialists, NEPmen, and bureaucrats with the particular personages of his factional enemies; at the same time, keeping the danger diffuse by stepping up the hunt for still unnamed, hidden rightists surely helped cripple potential inner-party objections to the Great Break.

The significant place IKP assumed in the invention of the right deviation cannot be understood outside the institution’s emergence as a distinct symbol in the inner-party struggle in the mid-1920s, when a small but tightly knit group in Bukharin’s entourage gained notoriety as the institute’s most prominent publicists against inner-party opposition. This group of about fifteen red professors, including the brothers Slepkov, Aikhenval’d, Astrov, David Petrovich Rozit, Aleksei Ivanovich Stetskii, A. N. Zaitsev, and others, gained prominence and a degree of notoriety through their work at Bol’ shevik and Pravda; many also worked in Bukharin’s personal secretariat and continued to teach at IKP. As a group, they became known as the “Bukharin School.”132

In their primary work as party publicists, these red professors produced among the most vociferous attacks on the successive oppositions; some of their number were sent to Leningrad after Zinov’ ev’s ouster in order to clean house ideologically through regional and local agitprop departments in the oppositionist stronghold. Small wonder it was the Leningrad oppositionists who first attacked this group as a “new school” at IKP, making derogatory references to the red professoriat and associating this prominent yet small circle with the institute as a whole. The Leningrad Opposition thus mobilized the anti-scholastic imagery brought out in 1924 by the party majority against Trotskii. Interestingly enough, two Trotskii supporters also joined in this tradition in 1927; while polemicizing with red professors representing the official line, they depicted the Bukharin School as the Party’s “specialists” in discrediting oppositionist platforms; the aim was to associate “professor Slepkov” and his colleagues with bourgeois specialists, and the term spetsy was repeated several times for emphasis. Now, it was the party orthodox, in the person of Iaroslavskii, who defended the revolutionary credentials of the red professors, praising them as “among the best communist-Leninists.”133

Bukharin with his students from the Institute of Red Professors (mid-1920s). Sitting in the first row (left to right): Ivan Adamovich Kravaev, Ian Ernestovich Sten, and Vasilii Nikolaevich Slepkov. In the second row (left to right): Dmitrii Petrovich Maretskii, A. N. Zaitsev, Grigorii Petrovich Maretskii, Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, David Petrovich Rozit, Aleksei Ivanovich Stetskii, Aleksandr Iakovlevich Troitskii, and Aleksandr Nikolaevich Slepkov. Reprinted by permission of the Museum of the Revolution, Moscow, Russia.

As Stalin and Bukharin and their allies fell out in the first half of 1928 in part over programmatic differences stemming from the Party’s left turn, there is some evidence that factional maneuvering in the Moscow party committee shook the leadership of the IKP party cell. By summer, Stalin used his traditional strength in party appointments to remove members of the Bukharin School from the editorial board of Pravda. Around the same time, Bukharin apparently acquiesced to the transfer of about fifteen red professors from his “school” to provincial teaching assignments around the country. The timing is crucial. These factional maneuverings, which organizationally decapitated a potential “right opposition” at IKP, took place during or before the summer months of 1928.134 Yet the political maelstrom surrounding “rightists,” and indeed the entire ideological creation of a right deviation, occurred during and after the fall of 1928, in fact after the Bukharin school at IKP was either absent or defeated.

It is in the revelation of the Right Opposition that Stalin’ s political theater came into play. A storm of attacks on the “right danger” In the Party was unleashed in the fall of 1928; even Bukharin and his associates took part in denouncing the Right. Stalin’s tension-building technique was a six-month-long unmasking of rightists, beginning with small or abstract targets and culminating in the condemnation of “Bukharin and Co.” in February 1929.135 On top of the self-criticism upheaval, the anti-specialist tum, and the campaign against the right danger, the final unmasking of Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomskii as the revealed rightist leaders followed in the best traditions of revolutionary theater — especially the kind, as in the most riveting agit-trials, where the full extent of the guilt of the masked enemy is tantalizingly unclear for a lengthy period.

At the party schools, the shake-up in the Moscow Party Committee in October–November 1928, a key moment in linking the right danger to Bukharin’s person, caused vast confusion until political orientation was regained. This itself indicates a degree of distance between the creation of the right deviation and the factional struggles preceeding it. For example, sixty members of the Communist Academy cell on 24 October convened a closed meeting that opened with the declaration that the problem of the “Right Opposition” had arisen in the previous three or four days. A discussion ensued at which the right danger was ritually condemned, but speakers could not bring themselves to believe Bukharin was its personification. According to the speaker Vainshtein, “The right deviation undoubtedly exists and it is necessary to fight it. . . . [But] there are no deviations with Bukharin.” Egorov warned: “We begin to break party discipline speaking about deviations in the TsK and Politburo.” Faingar came out with the most interesting statement: “The riglit deviation is much more dangerous (if it exists) than the left. In the matter of party information things are very bad. Sometimes nonparty people know more than we do ourselves. . . . Recently I heard from one bourgeois lady (a masseuse) that Bukharin was removed from the post cif editor of ‘Pravda.’” Were these communist students closet Bukharinists? It is highly doubtful, since they first unanimously voted to “direct the fue against the right deviation, which represents the main danger in our party” and then plaintively demanded better party information.136

At Sverdlov University’s cell in November, one activist caused a commotion by dramatically declaring: “Right here at the university there are deviations of a left and right nature (noise) . . . . The Bureau together with the party organizers must expose and destroy them.” Yet a moment later the same speaker added: “And if they do not exist, then that is good (noise).”137 Was this activist masking the existence of the right deviation, or were deviationists masking themselves? Even if neither were the case, the process of unmasking would go on.

The very existence of rightists, of course, depended how such deviationists were defined. Reports showing a reluctance to make “struggle with the right deviation” a main priority could be used to demonstrate the existence of such a deviation.138 A hunt for masked deviationists in late 1928 and 1929 became important for the sake of the hunt itself and branched out from rightists to “conciliationists,” waverers, “objective” rightists, and those who underestimated the right danger.

At IKP in the fall of 1928, the situation was somewhat different in that Bukharin and his supporters had personally been present, and three or four members of the cell of about 300 members were stigmatized as associates of the removed members of Bukharin’s entourage. Despite months of protestation of their loyalty to the party line and their anti-rightism, much activity in the cell revolved around unmasking their right opportunism. In the course of 1929, they too were purged. By 1929, much IKP theoretical work was directed against the anti-Leninist “mistakes of the right opportunists.”139

The two factions that vied for control in IKP’s party cell in the fall of 1928 may well have been motivated by personal animosities and desire for organizational command. Their concrete political differences became arguments over whether to struggle more to root out left oppositionists or right deviationists. Both groups expressed full support for the general line of the Party; indeed, the cell was later commended in a January Central Committee resolution for having “fulfilled the tasks of struggle with the right deviation.” However, spokesmen for the minority “left-wing” group (reportedly twenty percent of cell members) took the position that rightism was still pervasive and that that hidden Slepkovites remained at IKP. They complained the majority was spending as much time fighting them (as leftists) as rooting out rightists. To resolve the intractable conflict that had paralyzed the cell, Pokrovskii and thirty-five red professors were called in to a January 1929 meeting with Stalin and Molotov at the Central Committee Secretariat.

According to the report of a participant who took verbatim notes and sent them to the Moscow party committee, Stalin ordered a compromise in which the cell bureau was reelected and factional struggle renounced. Stalin, clearly not pleased with the Jeftist minority, remarked pointedly that conciliators of the left opposition were now appearing, and that the struggle against left deviationism was being forgotten; Molotov made clear that the left minority was harder to control from the Central Committee’s point of view. Both sides were reprimanded in somewhat different terms for ignoring struggle on two fronts, against both Left and Right. Stalin’s decisions were later written up point by point in a resolution on IKP’s cell put out in the name of the Central Committee.140 Here we observe Stalin dampening revolutionary zeal when it threatened to produce organizational breakdown. But the episode also confirms that IKP politics in the fall and winter of 1928 had elevated the shadow struggle to the point where it had become a liability to the leadership that had encouraged it.

None of this prevented IKP as a whole from being attacked as a stronghold of Bukharinism. Radicals from the institute itself turned on the IKP cell as “an organization of lacquered Communists, Slepkovites and concealed right opportunists.” In defense against these and similar accusations, the bureau of the cell several times documented all the measures taken against those few associated with the Right and protested bitterly to the Central Committee that “one cannot fling these accusations at the whole cell simply because there were a few comrades close to Bukharin and Slepkov at IKP.”141 Similarly, IKP also came under fire in the central press in 1929. Long after Bukharin, Rykov and Tomskii had been disgraced, it was felt necessary to prove that “right-ists use united tactics in their struggle with the party” — in effect, to establish that the Right was a genuine opposition, like the Left Opposition before it.142 IKP continued to be a convenient symbol, its members forced to prove their loyalty and revolutionary credentials over and over again.

The making of the right deviation after the fall of 1928, and the association of the “right danger” with inner-party opposition, thus grew out of the high-level leadership skirmishes that preceded it.143 The distinction, and the elusiveness of the Right itself, is implied in an analysis by Lars Lih: “There is an air of paradox about the right deviation. On the one hand, it was an ephemeral political opposition, quickly called into being by Stalin’s change of course in 1928 and as quickly defeated. On the other hand, it seemed to the Stalinist leadership to be a permanent enemy that could never be entirely rooted out.” Lih suggests that rightism in Stalin’s mind was connected to the notion of infection from bourgeois specialists that could touch any party member, and thus the right deviation “was defined less by any specific set of beliefs than by the logic of Stalin’s attitude.”144 It is interesting that Lih’s insight applies not just to Stalin’s particular mindset (for even he was in many ways the product of his milieu) but to a political culture revolving around combating infection, even, if necessary, before it appeared. The case of IKP is especially poignant, for in its search for the red expert it had been struggling for the greater part of a decade to immunize itself against the specialist within—the manifestations of “scholasticism” and “academicism,” the dangers of divorce from the proletarian masses, that the party scholars and intellectuals perceived in their own midst and which party higher education strove to combat.

The search for the red expert at IKP, the attempt to mold a type of educated and scholarly Bolshevik who would not be contaminated by such qualities, became a prime Bolshevik initiative in the Marxist social sciences during NEP and in the history of the party intelligentsia. The enterprise was born in conflict bequeathed by the identity crisis of party scholars and the anti-intellectualism of the Bolshevik intellectuals. It was shaped by the evolving structure of life in the party institution, marked by constant evaluation, purges that fused wide-ranging categories of evaluation, a curriculum uneasily poised between nauka and mass Marxism, and the shocks of the social reconstruction of an elite institution. This environment, combined with the ethos of the young red professors, contributed to a distinctively combative brand of Bolshevik political culture which informed both the party intellectual style at IKP and the practice of politics. This culture’s particular techniques of unmasking hidden deviance within the context of an omnipresent struggle extended from the education in the seminars, to the theoretical writing in the social sciences, to the inner-party political process. In this sense, the written word and the group gathering formed part of a continuum, a stage upon which the embattled red expert acted out a drama of revolutionary struggle.

The intricate web of interconnections explored here between culture, politics, and intellectual style point to a kind of Bolshevik ecosystem in which the constituent parts evolved in tandem.145 The analogy is useful, for an ecosystem can undergo shocks: IKP in the 1920s witnessed two such major shifts, the watershed of 1924 and the attack on the Right in 1928–29. In between, we have traced the spread within the ecosystem of a predator, an element of malignant fantasy: the struggle against hidden deviance, the elevation of the process of unmasking over the face of the unmasked. The underlying structures, the cultural predisposition, and the immediate political rationale were all in place so that this predatory component of the system could rage unchecked. For the communist intellectuals—to paraphrase a pertinent observation about revolutions—“Stalinism” was not made; it came.146

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1. “Ustav Instituta krasnoi professury,” no date, 1921, GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 2, l. 79; the quotation is from “Tezisy M. N. Pokrovskogo k voprosu o programmakh i metodakh prepodavaniia IKP,” ratified by the IKP academic council 9 October 1923, ibid., d. 100, l. 6; the figure is from Valerii D. Solovei, “Rol’ Instituta krasnoi professury v stanovlenii sovetskoi istoricheskoi nauki” (Candidate of Sciences diss., Moscow State University, 1987), 37. See also his “Institut krasnoi professury: Podgotovka kadrov istorikov partii v 20–30-e gody,” Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 12 (1990): 87–98.

2. Trinadtsatyi s”ezd Rossiiskoi kommunisticheskoi partii (bol’shevikov). Stenograficheskii otchet. 23–31 maia 1924 g. (Moscow: Krasnaia nov’, 1924), 539.

3. “Institut krasnoi professury,” 13 April 1921, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 64, J. 34; GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 2, J. 1; S. M. Dubrovskii, “K istorii Instituta krasnoi professury,” Istoricheskii arkhiv, no. 6 (1958): 76.

4. Dubrovskii, “K istorii Instituta,” 87. Deborin, a Menshevik from 1907 to 1917 and the leading Marxist philosopher of the 1920s, was an unusual case among those I have classified as party scholars, since he did not formally join the Party until 1928; but as editor of the leading philosophical journal Pod znamenem marksizma from 1922 to 1930, he was a party member in all but name. On his life and fate, see Ia. G. Rokitianskii, “Nesostoiavsheesia samoubiistvo,” Vestnik Rossiiskoi akademii nauk 63, no. 5 (1993): 458–62.

5. Initially, the most important text in the first year of study was Marx’s Kapital; for each seminar the student’s research paper had to be based on “primary sources.” See M. N. Pokrovskii, ed., Trudy Instituta krasnoi professury. Raboty seminariev, filosofskogo, ekonomicheskogo i istoricheskogo za 1921–1922 gg. (henceforth cited as Trudy IKP) (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1923), 7, 8, 14, 99. Deborin’s philosophy seminars sought in the Plekhanovian tradition to interpret the history of philosophy as culminating in the rise of Marxian materialism, but in contrast to trends which “contemporized” philosophy at IKP after 1924, the early work of his students treated the works of Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, and Rousseau. See A. M. Deborin, ed. Istoriko-Filosofskii sobornik—IKP sektsiia filosofiia (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Kommunisticheskoi Akademii, 1925).

6. In the former category, arnong those who survived the purges of the 1930s, one could include the prominent historians Isaak I. Mints, Anna M. Pankratova, the agrarian historian Sergei M. Dubrovskii, and the historian of the Decembrists, Militsa V. Nechkina; in the latter category, among those who did not, the entire “Bukharin school” of publicists, including Aleksandr N. Slepkov, an editor of the party theoretical organ Bol’shevik. For a listing of the graduates of the first class (selected in part by their future political fortunes) see O. D. Sokolov, M. N. Pokrovskii i sovetskaia istoricheskaia nauka (Moscow: Mysl’, 1970), 245.

7. Pokrovskü, introduction to Trudy IKP, 7–8.

8. According to Pokrovskii, of the ninety-three students accepted to the first class in 1921, only eighty-one rernained after the general party purge of 1921 and some disrnissals on academic grounds; six of these were not party members. Trudy IKP, 6, 10; GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 135, l. 13. Another document, however, put the number of nonparty students at over ten, even after the dismissals. RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 64, l. 36. IKP’s elite status and location in Moscow thus made it less accommodating to sympathizing nonparty students than other party institutions; in the communist universities and soviet-party schools across the country, larger numbers of nonparty students were forced out only in the purges of 1923 and 1924, and some stayed on even longer. Leonova, Iz istorii, 44, 48.

9. “Protokol zasedaniia Pravleniia IKP,” 15 December 1921, GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 2, l. 22; “Obshchee sobranie [kommunistov IKP],” 21 June 1922, RGAODgM f. 474, op. 1, d. 2, l. 16–17; “Zasedanie biuro iacheiki IKP,” no date, 1922, ibid., 1. 29–30; “V biuro kommunistov,” 29 September 1922, ibid., d. 3, l. 46.

10. K. Zavialova, I. Al’ter, Beloderkovskii, “V Agit-Propagandistskii otdel TsK,” no date, 1921, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 64, l. 36. The authors noted that they had joined the Party in 1906, 1909, and 1909 respectively.

11. “Zav. Agitpropom TsK Knorin. V Ts.K.K. 16 noiabria 1926,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 800, l. 46.

12. M. N. Pokrovskii, “V sekretariat TsK RKP. Dokladnaia zapiska,” no date, RTsKhIDNI f. 147, op. 1, d. 35, l. 11; “Vypiski iz protokola zasedaniia Orgbiuro TsK,” 13 October 1922 and 29 April 1923, ibid., 1. 4, 9.

13. Lenin to Pokrovskii, no earlier than 4 March 1921, in Leninskii sbornik (Moscow: OGIZ, 1945), 35:231.

14. Iaroslavskii to Lenin, 20 April 1921, and Lenin to Iaroslavskii, undated, RTsKhIDNI f. 89, op. 1, d. 82, l. 1. Lenin’s response is written in pencil on the same sheet. The letters were published in Leninskii sbornik (Moscow: Partiinoe izdatel’stvo, 1932), 20:323. A third figure, the old “godbuilder” Vladimir A. Bazarov, who had been associated with the Mensheviks as recently as the civil war, was prohibited, however, from teaching a course on Marx’s Kapital. “Vypiska iz protokola No. 59 zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK RKP,” 13 September 1921, RTsKhIDNI f. 147, op. 1, d. 35, l. 2.

15. See 1929 list of faculty, GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 336, l. 42–44, and d. 100, l. 17. Nonparty teachers at IKP in the 1920s included A. N. Savin, S. N. Valk, P. I. Liashchenko, and B. D. Grekov. GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 336, l. 42–44; L. V. Ivanova, U istokov sovetskoi istorieheskoi nauki: Podgotovka kadrov istorikov-marksistov v 1917–1929 gg. (Moscow: Mysl’, 1968), 126–27. In 1928 Tarle attempted to use his teaching experience at party institutions as a form of political protection; see “Pis’mo v redaktsiiu zhurnala ‘Bol’shevik’” and “Otvet akademiku E. Tarle,” Bol’shevik, 15 March 1928, 95–96.

16. Minutes of the admissions committee from the early 1920s are contained in GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 5.

17. GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 2, l. 63, 1. 11, and ed. khr. 5, 1. 19.

18. “Instruktsiia dlia Mandatnoi komissii IKP,” 26 February 1923, RGAODgM f. 474, op. 1, d. 4, l. 3; “Vypiska iz protokola No. 89 zasedaniia Orgbiuro TsK VKP(b),” 28 December 1928, RTsKhIDNI f. 147, op. 1, d. 35, l. 39.

19. For example, “Nomenldatura 1” was a list of all major party and state posts filled by the Central Commitree (many through the Politburo); it included first secretaries of republics, obkoms, kraikoms, people’s commissars, and “ambassadors to large countries.” See T. P. Korzhikhina and Iu. Iu. Figatner, “Sovetskaia nomenldatura: stanovlenie, mekhanizmy deistviia,” Voprosy istorii, no. 7 (1993): 25–38; and Volkogonov, Lenin: Politicheskii portret 2:102, citing a 1925 Politburo decree on the nomenklatura lists in RTsKhIDNI f. 80, op:19, d. 1, l. 6–14. For the first Politburo meeting, see RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 1.

20. “Seminarii T. Pokrovskogo II-kursa 5 marta 1928,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 20, l. 102; for example, “Budushchee intelligentsii,” in V. N. Soskin, ed., Sud’ by russkoi intelligentsii. Materialy diskussii, 1923–25 (Novosibirsk: Nauka, sibirskoe otdelenie, 1991), 16.

21. GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 2, l. 10; “Programma ekonomicheskogo otdeleniia,” no exact date, 1922, ibid., 1. 45.

22. Rigby, Communist Party Membership, 401.

23. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 73; on anti-intellectualism, 72–76. An extreme hostility toward the intelligentsia in the socialist movement became known as the deviation of “Makhaevshchina,” a pejorative derived from the writings at the turn of the twentieth century by the Polish socialist Machajski. The most complete account of the trend is in Marshall Shatz, Jan Wacław Machajski (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989).

24. Fitzpatrick, “Bolsheviks’ Dilemma,” 25–30; the classic work on the programs of the successive oppositions remains Robert Vincent Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960).

25. Valentin Astrov et al., “‘Ukomplektovannyi marksizm,’” Pravda, 21 November 1923, 1; Nadezhda Krupskaia, “Soedinenie marksistskoi teorii s praktikoi kommunizma,” Pravda, 25 November 1923, 1. The originals, witb Krupskaia’s handwritten corrections, are in tbe Krupskaia fond, RTsKhIDNI f. 12, op. 1, d. 611, l. 2–3, and d. 854, l. 4–5.

26. See “Diskussiia o prograrnme po politekonornike v komvuze (predsedatel’stvuet E. Preobrazhenskii),” in ZKS 2:343; N. I. Bukharin, “Lenin kak Marksist: Doklad na torzhestvennom zasedanii Kommunisticheskoi akademii,” 17 February 1924, in Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1988), 58.

27. Leopol’d Averbakh, “Eshche o ldassovoi bor’be i voprosakh kul’tury,” Bol’shevik, 31 December 1926, 87–104, and I. Ionov, “Pis’mo v redaktsiiu,” ibid., 105–6. I am indebted to Katerina Clark for suggesting this characterization of Ionov.

28. M. N. Pokrovskii, “Po povodu stat’i tov. Rubinshteina,” PZM, no. 10–11 (October-November 1924): 210–12.

29. Ts. S. Fridliand, “Voinstvuiushchii istorik-rnarksist (k shestidesiatiletiiu so dnia rozhdeniia M. N. Pokrovskogo),” PZM, no. 9–10 (September-October 1928): 5, 14; M. N. Pokrovskii, “Lenin, kak tip revoliutsionnogo vozhdia (Iz lektsii na kursakh sekretarei ukomov),” ibid., no. 2 (February 1924): 69.

30. “Zadachi i plan partiinoi raboty slushatelei IKP v 1922–23 Uchebnom godu (s oseni 1922 goda),” no date, fall 1922, RGAODgM f. 474, op. 1, d. 2, l. 37; GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 2, l. 74, 89; M. N. Pokrovskii, “Postanovka obshchestvovedeniia v komvuzakh, Vuzakh i dr. shkolakh vzroslykh,” no date, 1926, ARAN f. 1759, op. 1, d. 186, l. 10.

31. KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh, 9th ed. (Moscow: Politizdat, 1984), 3:282.

32. “Diskussiia o programme po politekonomike v Komvuze,” in ZKS 2:343; Evgenii B. Pashukanis, “Reorganizatsiia Instituta krasnoi professury,” Za leninskie kadry (Organ partkollektiva IKP) 1 (March 1930): 1.

33. “Protokol No. 41 Zasedaniia Politbiuro Ts.K. RKP ot 21.VI.21 goda,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, d. 17, l. 1–2; Emel’ian Iaroslavskii, “V Politbiuro TsK VKP (b),” no date, 1929, RTsKhIDNI f. 613, op. 3, d. 17, l. 29–30. This top secret report evaluates the results of all major purges from the 1920s. On the 1921 purge see Rigby, Communist Party Membership, 96–100.

34. “Polozhenie o proverke osnovnogo kursa [komuniversiteta im. Sverdlova],” no date, 1922 or 1923, GARF f. 5221, op. 4, d. 71, l. 17; “Rezoliutsiia biuro iacheiki ob akademicheskoi proverke [IKP],” 15 May 1928, ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 21, l. 56–57; GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 2, l. 101, and op. 1, d. 260, l. 2.

35. “Protokol zasedaniia Biuro kommunistov IKP,” 13 March 1923, RGAODgM f. 474, op. 1, d. 5, l. 3; GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 5, l. 12. On the expulsion of Poale-Zionists, see “Iz protokola Biuro iacheiki IKP,” 18 January 1926, GARF f. 5284, op. 1, ed. khr. 170, 1. 17. Nevertheless, Ainzaft’s 1922 book on the police-sponsored trade-unions of Zubatov and Gapon before 1905 went through four editions between 1922 and 1925.

36. See, for example, the files entitled “Protokoly zasedanii i sobranii seminarov,” GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 192, and “Protokoly starost osnovnykh otdel i sobranii seminarov,” ibid., d. 338.

37. “Vypiska iz protokola obshchego sobraniia kom”iacheiki IKP,” 18 February 1922, RGAODgM f. 474, op. 1, d. 2, l. 2; “Protokol obshchego sobraniia slushatelei-kommunistov IKP,” 26 June 1923, ibid., d. 4. 1. 5–10.

38. “Protokol zasedaniia komissii po chistke,” 20 June 1923, GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 2, l. 101–4. There is particularly complete information on the 1923 purge, in which 67 of the 409 students at IKP in the classes of 1921–1923 were expelled. On 23 May 1923 the bureau of the party cell formed a purge commission of seven members, all of them prominent students in the party organization, and delegated the secretary of the bureau to represent the commission at the Central Committee. “Protokol zasedaniia Biuro kommunistov [IKP],” 23 May 1923, RGAODgM f. 474, op. 1, d. 5. 1. 9.

39. GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 2, l. 107; RGAODgM f. 474, op. 1, d. 5, l. 15, 16; “Kossior (VTsSPS) Komissii po peresmotru slushatelei Instituta krasnoi professury,” no date, 1923, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 503, l. 34, 34 ob.

40. For an interesting discussion, see Lovell, Trotsky’s Analysis of Soviet Bureaucratization: A Critical Essay; see also Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 367–441.

41. The classic account remains E. H. Carr, The Interregnum (London: Macmillan, 1960), 257–366.

42. Darron Hincks, “Support for the Opposition in Moscow in the Party Discussion of 1923–1924,” Soviet Studies 44:1 (1992): 141.

43. “Protokol obshchego sobraniia kommunistov IKP,” 16 December 1923, RGAODgM f. 474, op. 1, d. 4., 1. 22–25.

44. “Protokol No. 59 Zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK RKP ot 2-go ianvaria 1924 g.,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, d 407, 1. 7–9.

45. “Protokol obshchego sobraniia slushatelei-kommunistov IKP,” 2 December 1923, RGAODgM f. 474, op. 1, d. 4, l. 17–18.

46. Mnukhin, “Beglye vospominaniia,” in X let Kommuniversiteta, 320–21; RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 18, l. 10–11.

47. “Protokol No. 80 Zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK RKP ot 20/III-1924 g.,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 428, 1. 5.

48. “O pis’me Trotskogo i zaiaylenii 46-ti (Iz zakliuchitel’nogo sloya t. 1. Stalina na XIII partkonferentsii),” in K. A. POPOY, ed., Diskussiia 1923 goda: Materialy i dokumenty (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1927), 8.

49. “Prilozhenie k prot. PB No. 27 p. 13 ot 19/X-1924. O rezul’tatakh proyerki (y okonchatel’noi redaktsii),” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 467, 1. 11. According to evidence cited by Fitzpatrick, in 1924 a tenth of all party members were students of some kind, half of them in VUZy and Komvuzy; a fourth of the Moscow party organization was made up of students. Fitzpatrick, Education, 95.

50. “Protokol soveshchaniia komuniversitetov pri P-otdel Propagandy Agitpropa TsK,” 20 March 1924, GARF f. 5221, op. 5, d. 89, l. 21; “Vypiska iz protokola No. 80 zasedaniia Orgbiuro TsK,” 14 March 1924, RTsKhIDNI f. 147, op. 1, d. 35, l. 17.

51. Peter Konecny, “Chaos on Campus: The 1924 Student Proverka in Leningrad,” Europe-Asia Studies 46:4 (1994): 618–19.

52. “Protokol No. 84 Zasedaniia Politbiuro Tseka RKP ot 10-go aprelia 1924 goda,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 432, 1. 5; Fitpatrick, Education, 98.

53. “Prilozhenie” to “Protokol No. 86 Zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK RKP ot 24.IV.1924 goda,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 434, 1. 11–13. However, “nonproletarian” medical, agricultural, and technical VUZy were to be treated “cautiously.”

54. Fitzpatrick, Education, 98, 100; Konecny,”Chaos,” 563–78; “V Tsentral’nuiu komissiiu po akadernicheskoi proverke VUZ-ov RSFSR. Otchet o rabote kornissii po akademicheskoi proverke FON-a pri MGU,” no earlier than 27 May 1924, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 755, l. 142–43; “V vysshikh uchebnykh zavedeniiakh,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, 10 May 1924, 13–14.

55. Trinadtsatyi s”ezd, 284; Fitzpatrick, Education, 100; “O rezul’tatakh proverki,” cited in full at note 49, 1. 9–11. The official Narkompros reportcriticized the purge as an extraordinary measure with “negative effects,” but praised positive improvements in the composition of the student body, academic motivation, and relations to Soviet power. “Itogi akadernicheskoi proverki sostava studenchestva vysshikh uchebnykh zavedenii,” 25 July 1924, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 755, l. 125–29.

56. E. IaIoslavskii, “V Politbiuro TsK VKP (b),” no date, 1929, RTsKhIDNI f. 613, op. 3, d. 17, l. 29–30; RTsKhiDNI f. 613, op. 2, d. 65, l. 24–25; “O predstoiashchei chistke partii,” Bol’shevik, no. 4 (28 February 1929), 3. Official 1930 data reported 8.9 percent of party mernbers and 12 percent of candidates were purged. A. Kh. Mitrofanov, Itogi chistki partii (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1930), 57.

57. “Protokol No. 145 zasedaniia Tsentral’noi proverochnoi kornissii pri partkollegii TsKK RKP(b) ot 31-X-24 g.,” RTsKhIDNI f. 613, op. 2, d. 7, l. 64–67; “Protokol No. 105 Zasedaniia Parttroiki Tsentral’noi Proverochnoi Kornissii pri Partkollegii TsKK RKP ot 9-IX-24 g.,” ibid., d. 6, l. 23–25.

58. “V Tsentral’nuiu kontrol’nuiu komissiiu,” no date, ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, ed. khr. 22, 1. 240; M. N. Pokrovskii, “Vsern sekretariarn TsK VKP(b) i tov. Molotovu,” 5 February 1931, RTsKhIDNI f. 147, op. 1, d. 33, l. 45; “Tov. Syrtsov (Agitprop) Tov. Bazanovu, Sekretariu MKK,” no date, 1924, ibid., op. 60, d. 772, l. 4–5. Pokrovskii soon became an advocate of proletarianization.

59. RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 755, l. 81, 81 ob; “Vypiska iz protokola No. 5 zasedaniia Sekretariata [Moskovskogo komiteta RKP] ot 24/V1-24,” ibid., d. 772, l. 1.

60. “Vypiska iz protokola No. 174 zasedaniia Partkollegii MKK ot 7, 8, 9, 14 i 15 iiunia 1924 goda,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 755, l. 83; “Agitprop Zam. Zav. K. Popov. V Sekretariat TsKK,” 4 June 1925, ibid., 1. 81, 81 ob. Other documents suggesting Trotskyists were targeted inelude Lunacharskii to Krupskaia, 14 May 1924, GARF f. A-2306, op. 1, d. 3397, l. 242–43; “Protokol obsbchego sobraniia kommunistov IKP,” 6 June 1924, ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 21, l. 2; and even K XIV s”ezdu RKP(b) (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1925), 98.

61. “Protokol zasedaniia Parttroiki partkollegii TsKK RKP ot 10-go marta 1924 g.,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 1, d. 19, l. 4–8.

62. “Protokol No. 118 zasedaniia parttroiki Tsentral’noi proverochnoi komissii pri partkollegii TsKK ot 25/IV-24,” RTsKhIDNI f. 613, op. 2, d. 6, l. 75, 83, 91, 117. For more such lists, see op. 1, d. 20, and d. 19, l. 1–164. The TsKK eventually reversed decisions on over one half of all dismissed party members in the 1924–25 purges of “nonproduction cells.” Iaroslavskii’s 1929 report to the Politburo indicated 5.9 percent of the members of those cells were purged in 1924–25, a figure which was reduced to 2.7 percent after the TsKK had heard all appeals. Iaroslavskii, “V Politbiuro TsK VKP(b),” no date, 1929, RTsKhIDNI f. 613, op. 3, d. 17, l. 29–30.

63. Unfortunately, the literature on purges in the 1930s has rarely been concerned with the experiences of the 1920s and has sometimes treated purge categories in a literal-minded way. For example, see Roberta T. Manning, “The Great Purges in a Rural District,” in J. Arch Getty and Manning, eds., Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 194–96.

64. One activist objected that many working-class rabfaks had strongly supported the opposition. O rabote iacheek RKP(b) Vysshikh uchebnykh zavedenii (Moscow: Izdanie TsK, 1925), 32.

65. “Rasshirennoe sobranie Krasno-Presnenskogo komiteta partii s aktivnymi rabotnikami iacheek,” 27 November 1924, RTsKhIDNI f. 89, op. 8, d. 442, l. 15; Iaroslavskii, “Partiia i VUZ-y,” no earlier than May 1924, RTsKhIDNI f. 89, op. 8, d. 435, l. 2–3; “Po povodu vystuplenii tov. Trotskogo,” Pravda, 28 Deeember 1924, 4; “Materialy zasedanii sektsii XIII s”ezda RKP(b) o rabote sredi molodezhi pod predsedatel’stvom N. I. Bukharina,” in N. I. Bukharin, K novomu pokoleniiu: Doklady, vystupleniia i stat’ i, posviashchennye problemam molodezhi (Moseow: Progress, 1990), 184–206.

66. See Trudy IKP, 7; GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 2, l. 92.

67. For an incisive interpretation of the construction of “estate-like” Marxist classes from the 1920s to the 1930s, see Fitzpatriek, “Ascribing Class.” On the complexities of determining proletarian status, see Sheila Fitzpatriek, “The Problem of Class Identity in NEP Society,” in Fitzpatriek et al., eds., Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 15–18. On class-discriminatory legislation, see Elise Kimerling, “Civil Rights and Social Poliey in Soviet Russia, 1918–1936,” Russian Review 41 (January 1982): 24–46.

68. John B. Hatch, “The ‘Lenin Levy’ and the Social Origins of Stalinism: Workers and the Communist Party in Moscow, 1921–28,” Slavic Review 48 (Winter 1989): 568; GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 98, l. 12; ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 24, l. 4.

69. “V Sekretariat TsK—dokladnaia zapiska. K voprosu ob IKP,” no date, 1929, GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 135, l. 13; James McClelland, “Proletarianizing the Student Body: The Soviet Experience During the New Economic Policy,” Past and Present 80 (August 1978): 124. According to Narkompros data from 1 January 1924, the ten komvuzy then in existence were made up of 47 percent workers and children of workers, 33.5 percentpeasants and children of peasants, 12 percent sluzbasbcbie, 0.3 percent Red Army soldiers, and 7.2 percent “others.” Cited in Leonova, Iz istorii, 44.

70. IKP’s percentage of “workers” reached 50 percent in 1930–31 and peaked at 64 percent in 1931–32, again significantly higher than statistics for higher education as a whole. See the artide signed Dubynia and [Anna M.] Pankratova, “Desiat’ let Instituta krasnoi professury,” Bor’ba klassov, no. 8–9 (1931): 24; McClelland, “Proletarianizing the Student Body,” 124.

71. “Tezisy i predlozheniia uchebnoi komissii po voprosam ob itogakh priema 1927,” GARF f. 5284, op. 1, ed. khr. 134, 1. 21.

72. GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 260, l. 10. The importance proletarianization assumed at IKP is underlined in a 1926 letter from Bukharin to Pokrovskii daiming a student from one of the “oldest Bolshevik families” had been rejected from IKP because his father was an engineer. It took a letter from Bukharin, at the height of his power, to admit the student. “Don’t be angry at such ‘interference’ [penetration pacifique] in the internal affairs of the institute,” Bukharin joked. “You, after aH, are not an English trade-unionist.” Bukharin to Pokrovskii, 21 September 1926, ARAN f. 1759, op. 4, d. 418, l. 1.

73. Pokrovskii’s remark is contained in ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 20, l. 106; on the preparatory section, see “O perestroike raboty podgotovitel’nogo otdeleniia,” no date, GARF f. 5284, op. 1, a. 336, 1. 128; “Protokol obshchego sobraniia pervoi gruppy vtorogo kursa podgotovitel’nogo otdeleniia,” 19 April 1927, ibid., d. 193, l. 21; Biulleten’ zaochnoi konsul’tatsii IKP, no. 1 (1931): 4.

74. “Tezisy i predlozheniia,” 1. 21 (cited in full at note 71).

75. “Protokol sobraniia slushatelei II-gruppy II-kursa,” 22 April 1927, GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 193, l. 32; “Protokol zasedaniia prepodavatelei i starostata Podgotovitel’nogo otdeleniia IKP,” no date, 1927, ibid., ed. khr. 134, 1. 25–28.

76. “Tezisy i predlozheniia,” 1. 20 (cited in full at note 71); “Protokol zasedaniia prepodovatelei i starostata,” 1. 25 (cited in full at note 75). For more debates on IKP’s purpose and raising standards, see GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 338, l. 18, and d. 134, l. 127.

77. “V Pravlenie IKP, 17.III.27,” GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 338, l. 17; see also another student protest on the name change in the same file, unnumbered page between 1. 17 and 1. 18.

78. “V Sekretariat TsK,” 1. 11–17 (cited in full at note 69); list of early graduates, GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 98, l. 69.

79. “V Sekretariat TsK,” 1. 13 (cited in full at note 69).

80. “Rabota slushatelei istoricheskogo otdeleniia,” no date, 1928, ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 20, l. 175–219.

81. GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 2, l. 25; see also d. 170, l. 1.

82. “Tezisy Agit-propa TsK VKP s popravkami, vnosimymi Biuro kommunistov IKP,” no date, 1923, GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 100, l. 10; “O napravlenii uchebnoi i nauchnoi raboty IKP (postanovlenie soveshchaniia pri Agit-prope TsK),” no month or day given, 1923, GARF f. A-2313, op. 4, d. 69, l. 44; “Tezisy t. Popova,” no date, 1923, GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 100, l. 9; “Soveshchanie pri Podotdele propagandy TsK RKP po uchebnomu planu i prograntmam IKP,” 27 October 1923, RTsKhIDNI f. 147, op. 1, d. 35, l. 12–13.

83. Popov’s 1923 plan, untitled with handwritten corrections, is in RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 466, l. 44. Popov pointedly singled out the philosophy program for “fundamental revision” because of the stress on “pre-Marxian” philosophy established by Aksel’rod and Deborin.

84. “Protokol soveshchaniia po uchebnomu planu i programmam Instituta krasnoi professury pri P-otdel propagandy Agitpropa TsK RKP,” 20 October 1923, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 466, l. 38–39, and 10 November 1923, ibid., 1. 45–46; “O napravlenii uchebnoi i nauchnoi raboty Instituta krasnoi professury (Postanovlenie soveshchaniia pri Agitprope TsK, v redaktsii soglasovana s I.K.P.),” no date, 1923, ibid., 1. 52.

85. “Tezisy M. N. Pokrovskogo,” 1. 21–22 (cited in full at note 1); “Seminarii t. Pokrovskogo II-Kursa, 5 marta 1928,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 20, l. 106, 138.

86. Pokrovskii, Trudy IKP, 5. A list of natural science department dissertations can be found in “Protokol zasedaniia Uchebnoi Kollegii IKP, 28/XI-28,” GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 336, l. 14. The most substantial historical treatment of Pokrovskii remains George Enteen’s The Soviet Scholar-Bureaucrat: M. N. Pokrovskii and the Society of Marxist Historians (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978).

87. See “Rabota slushatelei.” A discussion of “contemporary” and “revolutionary” themes in Marxist historiography is contained in Iu. V. Krivosheev and A. Iu. Dvornichenko, “Izgnanie nauki: Rossiiskaia istoriografiia v 20-x-nachale 30-x godov XX veka,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 3 (May-June 1994): 143–58.

88. Pokrovskii, “Postanovka obshchestvovedeniia,” 1. 10 (cited in full at note 30).

89. “O propagande i izuchenii Leninizma,” 9 February 1924, GARF f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 87, l. 57–62. Commissions included Agitprop, Glavpolitprosvet, GUS, the Komsomol, VTsSPS, the Red Army’s PUR, and the Lenin Institute. See “Vypiska iz postanovleniia ob obshchestvennom minimume i propagande leninizma v VUZ-akh priniatogo na zasedanii Sekretariata TsK RKP,” 2 January 1925, RTsKhIDNI f. 147, op. 2e, d. 5, l. 13; GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 193, l. 21.

90. Esfir’ B. Genkina, “Vospominaniia ob IKP,” in Istoriia i istoriki: istoriograficheskii ezhegodnik, 1981 (Moscow: Nauka, 1985), 268–69.

91. Mikhail Rogov, “Ocherki Sverdlovii,” Molodaia gvardiia, no. 5 (1924): 200–201.

92. Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 146; also Stites, Revolutionary Dreams.

93. Clark, Petersburg, 74–104.

94. In what follows I am indebted above all to what are, to my knowledge, the only two sustained analyses of agit-trials: Julie Anne Cassiday, “The Theater of the World and the Theater of the State: Drama and the Show Trial in Early Soviet Russia” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1995), and Elizabeth A. Wood’s unpublished paper, “Agitation Trials: Theater and State Power in Post-Revolutionary Russia.”

95. Cassiday, “Theater,” 54. See a description of the “new method” during the civil war, as enacted in the School of Infantry Officers of the Red Army, in Alexander Barmine, One Who Survived: The Life Story of a Russian Under the Soviets (New York: G. P. Putnarn’s Sous, 1945), 65.

96. “Vidy massovykh postanovok,” in Ryndich, Partiino-sovetskie shkoly, 124; Cassiday, “Theater,” 56, 61.

97. Gorzka, Arbeiterkultur, 348; Eugene Huskey, Lawyers and the Soviet State: The Origins and Development of the Soviet Bar, 1917–1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 137; von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 109–10; “Rabota v Krasnoi Armii, Militsii i voiskakh VChK,” probo December 1921, GARF f. A-2313, op. 1, d. 1, l. 450–51.

98. S. Kotliarenko, “Iz opyta klubnoi raboty v sovpartshkole,” Kommunisticheskoe prosveshchenie, no. 6 (November-December 1926): 161–63; V. Pletnev, “Massovaia propaganda cherez iskusstva,” Kommunisticheskaia revoliutsiia, no. 4 (February 1927): 51–60; “Polozhenie o studencheskikh klubakh pri V.U.Z. Respubliki, 23/VII-21 g.,” GARF f. A-2313, op. 3, ed. khr. 29, 1. 9; “Polozhenie o edinoi seti i tipakh klubov R.S.F.S.R., 28/IX-21 g.,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 54, l. 1.

99. Wood, “Agitation Trials,” 4, 7–8; Cassiday, “Theater,” 56–57, 61.

100. Clark, Petersburg, 111–12; Cassiday, 65–66 and passim.

101. The phrase comes from the title of chapter 7 of Fülöp-Miller, Mind and Face.

102. S. Dvinov, “K protsessu SR (pis’mo iz Moskvy),” Sotsialisticheskij vestnik, 2 August 1922, 5–6; “Komu eto nuzhno,” ibid., 21 March 1922, 1–3; L. Martov, “Krovavyi fars,” ibid., 18 June 1922, 3–5; “K protsessu S.R.,” ibid., 20 June 1922, 10–11.

103. Wood, “Agitation Trials,” 13.

104. GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 193, l. 52.

105. Ibid., d. 192, l. 45, 46, 48–49, 561, and d. 338, l. 29.

106. M. N. Pokrovskii to E. M. Iaroslavskii, 27 February 1930, RTsKhIDNI f. 89, op. 8, d. 39, l. 3.

107. L. Trotskii, “Ne nado musoru! V Tsentral’nyi komitet VKP(b). V biuro iacheiki Instituta krasnoi professury. 22/IV.27,” Trotsky Archive, T-3052.

108. GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 192, l. 20, 33, 56, and d. 338, l. 21. For an attack on Deborin’s attempts to consolidate institutional control at this time, see Ivan I. Skvortsov-Stepanov to Molotov, handwritten, undated letter marked “Sekretno. Lichno,” RTsKhIDNI f. 150, op. 1, d. 82, l. 15. Var’iash, who also used his Hungarian name Sandor Varjas, had served under Bela Kun and came to Moscow in 1922. On his place in the mechanist faction and his disputes with the Deborinites, see Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, 143–45.

109. GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 192, l. 26, and d. 338, l. 12.

110. “Protokol sobranüa slushatelei II gr. II kursa P/otdel 31/v/27,” GARF f. 5284, op. 1, ed. khr. 193, 1. 44.

111. “Protokol obshchego sobraniia seminarov russkikh istorikov 2-ogo kursa,” GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d: 192, l. 22, and 1. 8–9.

112. “Protokol zasedaniia slushatelei II i I kursa filosofskogo otdeleniia, 3/III/25,” GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 192, l. 1.

113. Pierre Bourdieu, “Systems of Education and Systems of Thought,” International Social Science Journal 19:3 (1967): 339.

114. Jane L. Price, Cadres, Commanders, and Commissars: The Training of the Chinese Communist Leadership, 1920–45 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1976), 36, 96. Price cites a Chinese source indicating that Sun-Yat-Sen University’s famous “28 Bolsheviks,” later leaders of the Stalinist faction in the CPC, attended IKP classes (101 n. 17). See also Yueh Sheng, Sun Yatsen University in Moscow and the Chinese Revolution: A Personal Account (Lawrence: University of Kansas, Center for East Asian Studies, 1971), 81.

115. I am summarizing Cassiday’s illuminating and original discussion of “theatrical paradigm” in early Soviet show trials, which concentrates on the trial of SRs in 1922 and the Shakhtii trial of 1928. Cassiday, “Theater,” 82–118.

116. The notes of a participant, the future academician Mitin, are cited by Rokitianskii, “Nesostoiavsheesia samoubiistvo,” 459–60; see also V. V. Umshikhin, “‘Nachalo kontsa’ povedencheskoi psikhologii v SSSR,” in M. G. Iaroshevskii, ed., Repressirovannaia nauka (Leningrad: Nauka, 1991), 137.

117. Nikolai Krementsov, “Rhetoric and Rituals of Soviet Science,” unpublished paper, 1–40, and his Stalinist Science (in press, Princeton University Press).

118. Daniel Orlovsky produces some interesting material suggesting the “masked quality of Soviet society” in “The Hidden Class: White-Collar Workers in the Soviet 1920s,” in Siegelbaum and Suny, Making Workers Soviet, 220.

119. “Direktiva TsK oh otnosheniiakh k byvshym oppozitsioneram (utverzhdena Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) 18.x.1929),” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 763, 1. 6.

120. A. Slepkov, “Orudie pobedy (k istoricheskoi roli chrezvychainykh organov po bor’be s kontrrevoliutsiei), Bol’shevik, no. 1 (15 January 1928), 46–55; the book cited is E. V. Tarle, Revoliutsionnyi tribunal v epokhu Velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii (Moscow: “Byloe,” 1918).

121. L. Man’kovskii, “Marksizm Georga Lukacha,” in I. Luppol, ed., Protiv noveishei kritiki marksizma. Sbornik kriticheskikh ocherkov (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1929), 1.

122. Quoted in Krementsov, “Rhetoric and Rituals,” 24.

123. A. Slepkov, “Ob ‘uklonakh’ i vozmozhnykh putiakh vozmozhnogo pererozhdeniia,” Bol’shevik, no. 3–4 (20 May 1924), 23.

124. A. Slepkov, “Kak reagirovala oppozitsiia na resheniia XV s”ezda,” Bol’shevik, no. 3–4 (29 February 1928), 19–31.

125. M. Brudnyi, “O pravoi i levoi opasnosti,” Bol’shevik, no. 1 (15 January 1928), 26–34; in a similar vein, “Pravaia, levaia, gde storona,” Za leninskie kadry 1 (March, 1930): 2. Suggestive insights into such relativistic pairings at the heart of Soviet “ideolanguage” — and their manipulation in the “inventions” of rightist and leftist deviations—are contained in Mikhail Epstein, “Relativistic Patterns in Totalitarian Thinking: The Linguistic Games of Soviet Ideology,” in After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture, trans. Anesa Miller-Pogacar (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), esp. 128–29.

126. The classic account of the Right in 1928–29 is in Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 270–336. Cohen’s most substantial source on IKP (431 n. 31; 296, 450 n. 118) and the most influential “eyewitness” account of the Stalin-Bukharin conflict in general, is Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov’s attempt to combine memoirs and Sovietological analysis, Stalin and tbe Soviet Communist Party: A Study in the Technology of Power (New York: Praeger, 1959). Avtorkhanov, however, is not a reliable source. He claims to have been a well-connected IKP student linked to high-level rightists in Moscow in 1928–29, but his personal file from IKP Istorii, where he studied from 1934 to 1937 (GARF f. 5143, op. 1, d. 255), places him as a twenty-year-old rabfak student in Groznyi. In short, his depiction of Bukharinism cannot be separated from his reconsttuction of his own past. For a full-length piece of source criticism, see Michael David-Fox, “Memory, Archives, Politics: The Rise of Stalin in Avtorkhanov’s Tecbnology of Power,” Slavic Review 54 (Winter 1995): 988–1003.

127. See especially Merridale, Moscow Politics, 46 and passim.

128. For example, Em. Iaroslavskii, “O dvurushnichestve voobshche i dvurushnikakh-trotskistakh v chastnosti,” Bol’shevik, no. 4 (28 February 1929), 18–28. The creation of “the image of an organized ‘Right Opposition’” is all too briefly invoked as a starting point for Gábor Támas Rittersporn’s “The Omnipresent Conspiracy: On Soviet Imagery of Politics and Social Relations in the 1930s,” in Getty and Manning, Stalinist Terror, 106.

129. “K voprosu o proiskhozhdenii legendy o ‘Trotskizme’ (Dokumental’naia spravka),” 21 November 1927, Trotsky Archive, bMS Russ 13-T-3122.

130. Catherine Merridale, “The Reluctant Opposition: The Right ‘Deviation’ in Moscow, 1928,” Soviet Studies 41 July 1989): 382–400.

131. See, for example, Trotsky’s 1927 identification of “the right danger,” which he here associated most closely with Rykov and “Rykovites,” as the main threat of Thermidor. “Iul’skii plenum i pravaia opasnost’ (Posleslovino k pis’mu ‘Chto zhe dal’she’),” 22 June 1927, Trotsky Archive, bMS Russ 13-T-3126.

132. For a full-Iength discussion of the Bukharin School and its members, see C. I. P. Ferdinand, “The Bukharin Group of Political Theoreticians” (Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 1984); for evidence on work in Bukharin’s secretariat, see GARF f. 5284, op. 1, d. 56, l. 6. See also Cohen, Bukharin, 217–18.

133. V. Emel’ianov and T. Khorechko, “Nash otvet Slepkovu,” in Iu. Fel’shtinskii, ed., Arkhiv Trotskogo (Moscow: Terra, 1990), 4: 87–98; and Iaroslavskii’s articles “O novoi shkole” (orig. in RTsKhIDNI f. 89, op. 8, d. 452, l. 1–2), Pravda, 24 December 1925, 3, and “Novoe i staroe v ‘novoi’ oppozitsii,” Pravda, 24 July 1927, 5; Ferdinand, “Bukharin Group,” 96. After the experience of reprisals against the opposition in 1924, the United Opposition found little support at IKP. One report put the number of IKP students supporting the opposition in 1926 at 10 percent of the total. M. Shamberg, “Oppozitsionnyi blok i studenchestvo,” Krasnoe studenchestvo, no. 8 (1 November 1926), 4–6.

134. See a lengthy Politburo document on struggles at Pravda, “Chlenam i kandidatam TsK VKP(b). 6.IX.1929,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 756, 1. 16; Ferdinand, “Bukharin Group,” 246–47; “Dorogoi tovarishch,” Moscow Trotskyist(?) to Trotskii(?), September 1928, Trotsky Archive, T2442.

135. Daniels, Conscience, 336–44.

136. “Protokol No. 7 obshchego sobraniia chlenov i kandidatov VKP(b) iacheiki Kom. Akademii ot 24–go Oktiabria 1928,” RGAODgM f. 477, op. 1, ed. khr. 20, 1. 102–4.

137. “Protokol No. 5 obshchego sobraniia iacheiki Komuniversiteta Sverdlova ot 29/XI-1928,” RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 30, l. 48–50.

138. See, for example, “Protokol No. 4 zasedaniia Biuro iacheiki Komuniversiteta Sverdlova ot 17–go oktiabria 28 g.,” RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 31, l. 70.

139. See the letter from one teacher associated with Bukharin: Vladimir Kuz’min, “Pis’mo v redaktsiiu ‘Izvestii.’ Kopiia v Biuro iacheiki IKP, 5/III-29,” RGAODgM f. 474, op. 1, ed. khr. 9, 1. 78; “Vyvody po obsledovaniiu iacheiki [IKP] sostavitelei za vremia s 1/1 po 1/X/29,” ibid., d. 9, l. 150–73; and, for example, the report for Adoratskii’s seminar for third-year students in the “history of the party” department: Ian P. Krastyn’, “Lenin o soiuze proletariat s krest’ianstvom i oshibki pravykh opportunistov,” no date, 1929, GARF f. 5284, op. 1, ed. khr. 384, 1. 50–103.

140. “IKP, po informatsii t. Fin’kovskogo na biuro R[ai] K[oma],” 3 December 1928, RGAODgM f. 474, op. 1, d. 9, l. 50–54; “Rezoliutsiia TsK o polozhenii v iacheike IKP,” no later than 18 January 1929, ibid., 1. 2–3. Students then wrote letters of self-criticism to renounce their previous positions. See 1. 181–83. Other documents from IKP’s cell support this reconstruction of events; for example, “Protokol obshchego sobraniia part”iacheiki IKP,” 18 January 1929, ibid., 1. 1. One memoir identifies Fin’kovskii as an Old Bolshevik, head of the raikom where IKP was located, and a “well-known ttoubleshooter.” Sheng, Sun Yat-sen University, 29.

141. “V TsK VKP(b),” no date, 1929, ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 21, l. 168, and 1. 94–100; RGAODgM f. 474, op. 1, d. 9, l. 4, 20–22, 25.

142. “Fraktsionnaia vylazka pravykh v iacheike Instituta krasnoi professury,” Pravda, 13 November 1929, 3; G. K., “Reshitel’nyi otpor pravym,” Izvestiia, 28 February 1929.

143. The use of the term “deviation” rather than “opposition” as the standard appellation thereafrer is significant because it indicates a reluctance even on the part of the victors to accord the Right the status of a full-fledged opposition.

144. Lars Lih, introduction to Lih et al., eds., Stalin’s Letters to Molotov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 49.

145. After I had arrived at this metaphor via political culture and institutional environment in the 1920s, I discovered that at the center of Clark’s recent work is the notion of an “ecology of revolution,” used to describe a cultural system which, rather than developing in a unilinear fashion, was marked by “punctuated evolution.” Clark, Petersburg, ix–28.

146. Wendall Phillips’s aphorism is referred to in Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 17.