Bolshevik Leaders correspondence

Bolshevik leadership Correspondence. 1912-1927
Collection of documents 1996.
Compiled by: A.V.Kvashonkin, L.P.Kosheleva, L.A.Rogovaya, O.V.Khlevnyuk.

FROM THE COMPILERS

The official and personal correspondence of the leaders of the Bolshevik Party is one of the most interesting and little-studied sources on the history of the USSR. As a source of the most important informal information, letters are unique. The Soviet leaders did not keep diaries, and therefore, mainly from letters, one can get information about those informal aspects of "big politics" (personal relations of the Bolshevik leaders, their predilections and logic of actions, the procedure for preliminary coordination of decisions, etc.) that are absent in official documents . In the study of the rigidly centralized Soviet political system, these problems take on special significance. Without taking them into account, it is impossible to understand the real mechanism of decision-making and the functioning of the party-state apparatus.

All this is doubly true of the period covered by this volume. The documents published in it date back to the time of the Civil War and the New Economic Policy. (Several letters from the pre-revolutionary period are only small "quotes", the purpose of which is to fix a peculiar initial level of relations between the leaders of the Bolsheviks). It was a time of struggle for power both with an external enemy and within the party itself. The various factions in the Bolshevik leadership that began to form during the years of the civil war clashed openly after Lenin's death. The decisive stage of this confrontation ended mainly in 1927. At the same turn, which was chosen as the final facet of the collection, there was an obvious departure from the new economic policy.

The letters contain considerable information about the intra-Party struggle and make it possible to reveal how and when the opposing groupings were formed in the center and in the localities. Growing out of the Central Committee, each such group recruited supporters among the regional and national political elite and tried to promote its representatives to key positions. A significant part of the published correspondence concerns the activities of the most close-knit and strong group headed by I. V. Stalin. Relying on loyal comrades-in-arms, Stalin gradually concentrated control over the most important levers of the party and state apparatus in his hands. It is no coincidence that in a confidential letter to G.K. Ordzhonikidze in August 1922, A.M. Nazaretyan, who headed one of the key divisions of the apparatus of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) - the Bureau of the Secretariat

Correspondence of G. K. Ordzhonikidze, I. V. Stalin, A. M. Nazaretyan, S. M. Kirov and others gives grounds to speak about the existence of close relations and coordination of actions in the Stalinist group. With the rise of Stalin, "went uphill" and his associates. Ordzhonikidze after the defeat of the "new opposition" headed the Central Control Commission, Kirov - the Leningrad party organization, Voroshilov and Budyonny occupied the highest military positions, etc. It would be wrong, however, to simplify the relationship between Stalin and his entourage. As the published letters show, Stalin's supporters enjoyed a relatively large share of political independence during this period and allowed themselves to express disagreement with Stalin.

The process of formation of political groupings was not limited to relations in Moscow. Stalin's comrades-in-arms were overgrown with "their own", personally devoted to them people on the ground, acquiring the status of mini-leaders. “Without exaggeration, without falsehood, I declare quite sincerely,” wrote, for example, the head of the Abkhazian government Lakoba Ordzhonikidze, “that everywhere and everywhere in our revolutionary work, under all foreseen and unforeseen conditions, dear Sergo will accompany me and my comrades, like a leader, as an inspirer, whom we so easily perceive with a pure mind and heart [...] I want to tell you directly about only one thing. It is that I was madly burning and burning with the desire to convince you by my work, my behavior, my revolutionary plans that I am devoted to the Communist Revolution and to you personally.1 . The relationships and hierarchy within the leadership group were reflected in the language of the letters.

The Stalinist group in the period under review was not homogeneous and monolithic. The next split or consolidation of this group on a new basis, with the involvement of new supporters, in its own way reflected the main stages of Soviet political history 2 .

In addition, the correspondence contains information that is not available in other sources about events in the country, in the field of international relations, etc.

When selecting material for the collection, the compilers were guided by their ideas about the significance of certain documents. The book is not devoted to any specific problem and does not pretend to elucidate all the questions of the activities of the Soviet leaders and the struggle in the leadership of the party in the first post-revolutionary decade. Each block of submitted documents can be significantly expanded and become the subject of a special study.

The letters of the Soviet leaders were repeatedly published in previous years. The most well-known and extensive selection of such documents made up separate volumes of the complete works of V. I. Lenin. However, until the end of the 1980s. many letters for political reasons were not introduced into scientific circulation. The situation has changed recently. Numerous publications of letters (a list of the most important of them is given in the appendix) have significantly expanded the source base for studying the history of the Soviet period. The present collection is a continuation of this work.

The book includes materials from the collections of the Russian Center for the Storage and Study of Documents of Contemporary History (RTSKHIDNI). First of all, these are documents from the personal funds of V. I. Lenin (F. 2), F. E. Dzerzhinsky (F. 76), M. I. Kalinin (F. 78), V. V. Kuibyshev (F. 79 ), S. M. Kirov (F. 80), G. K. Ordzhonikidze (F. 85), collections of documents of I. V. Stalin (F. 558). The Fund of the Secretariat of V. I. Lenin is widely represented (F. 5). A number of documents were taken from the fund of the Central Committee of the RCP(b)-VKP(b) (F. 17) - in the files of the General (Op. 66) and Organizational and Distribution (Op. 68) departments of the Central Committee, in collections of opposition documents in the VKP(b) (Op. 71) and on questions of the defense of the Soviet Republic and military development (Op. 109). The collection ends with a letter from N. Osinsky to A. I. Rykov and I. V. Stalin from the fund of the secretariat of A. I. Rykov in the State Archives of the Russian Federation (GARF. F. R-5446. Op. 55).

The collection consists of two sections, a name index, a list of abbreviations, a list of selected bibliography and a table of contents in Russian and English. In addition, the collection includes a table of contents in English of the first book in the series "Documents of Soviet History" - "Stalin's Politburo in the 30s" (M., 1995).

All documents are dated. Dates set by the compilers are placed in square brackets.

The documents are arranged in chronological order. The numbering of documents is continuous.

In preparing the publication, the compilers tried to preserve the characteristic features and features of the documents. In some documents (autographs), grammatical errors of the authors were reproduced for this purpose (for example, documents No. 64, 228, 229). The persistence of such errors is not specifically specified. Reproduced in the collection and stylistic absurdities and inconsistencies found in the documents. They are all marked with an asterisk (*).

In those cases where the correspondence was represented by telegrams, notes and conversations over a direct wire, and spelling errors could belong to technical staff, the compilers corrected the text for ease of reading in accordance with modern orthography.

The numbers and ciphers of the telegrams were removed by the compilers without additional reservations.

Abbreviations made by the compilers are marked with dots in square brackets.

Separate words cited in the documents in abbreviated form were restored only in those cases when it was necessary for their understanding.

Fragments of the text crossed out by the authors of the letters were restored (with a corresponding reservation) only in cases where these cross-outs were of fundamental importance. Documents reproduce text underlines made by letter authors.

Determining the heading of documents, the compilers did not single out different types of correspondence (letters, notes, appeals, etc.), especially since this is not easy to do in many cases. Specially, only indications of telegrams and direct wire conversations are included in the headline.

The compilers of the collection express their deep gratitude to the staff of the Department of Information and Bibliographic Work of the Scientific Library of Moscow State University. A. M. Gorky, E. A. Orlova, I. I. Filimonova, and S. I. Boltacheva, who prepared the selected bibliography;

Notes:

1 RTSHIDNI. F.85. Op. 1/S. D. 11. L. 12-13.

2 For more details, see: Graziosi AGL Piatakov (1890-1937): A Mirror of Soviet History // Harvard Ukrainian Studies / Vol. XVI, No. 1/2, June, 1992, pp. 127-134.