EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES

Vol. 65, No. 10, December 2013, 19121930

Policing the Party: Conicts between

Local Prosecutors and Party Leaders
under Late Stalinism
EDWARD D. COHN

Abstract
During the late Stalin era, many of the USSRs local party control ofcials and prosecutors entered into a
protracted conict over who had the right to judge the conduct of communists; prosecutors charged that party
committees were shielding communists from prosecution, while control ofcials claimed that party organs
were deferring to prosecutors and abandoning their traditional oversight role. This article will argue that
although some party committees were interfering in the courts, the dominant story of party procuracy
relations under post-war Stalinism involved the disengagement of party organs from the oversight of
administrative wrongdoing, with long-lasting consequences for the Soviet regimes attitude toward corruption.

ON 5 APRIL 1951, A. A. NABATOVTHE PROCURATOR OF THE KAZAKH Soviet Socialist

Republicwrote a blistering report to his republics Central Committee. Nabatov began by
complaining about an epidemic of crimes by local communists in 1949 and 1950; many of
these offences involved embezzlement and the theft of state property, while others involved
hooliganism and violent crime. (One especially dramatic case centred on a party ofcial
who kicked [another man] in the region of his sexual organs, rendering him impotent and
thereby helping to bring about his divorce.)1 Nabatov quickly linked this crime spree to his
reports main theme: the protection ( pokrovitelstvo) of criminal wrongdoers by local
party leaders. Although procuracy ofcials wanted to prosecute each of the alleged
criminals mentioned in the report, the secretaries of their district and provincial party
committees (raikomy and obkomy) had refused to investigate them, forbidden their
prosecution, let them remain in the party and limit[ed] their punishment to a party penalty
(that is, a mere reprimand). All of this creates a long delay in the investigation of criminal
cases, Nabatov wrote,
especially those involving groups where several people are accused. The non-communists
[bespartiinye ] involved in these cases are arrested, but the communist who committed criminal acts
1
Nabatovs report appears in Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv rossisskoi federatsii (hereafter GARF) f. 8131, o. 32,
d. 13, ll. 1420, with the kicking victim appearing on l. 16.

ISSN 0966-8136 print; ISSN 1465-3427 online/13/100191219 q 2013 University of Glasgow

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2013.848644

POLICING THE PARTY

1913

remains at liberty only because the party organs do not allow him to be arrested and tried, which
cannot help but call forth the justied condemnation of the surrounding population.2

As a result of this party interference in the judicial process, Nabatov concluded, large
numbers of communists had been shielded from responsibility for their actions and the work
of the courts had been seriously impaired.
For the previous ve years, however, other ofcials in both Kazakhstan and Moscow had
painted a very different picture of criminal justice in the republic, sending two damning
messages about local party organs: they were far too lackadaisical and disorganised to
complete their traditional oversight role and instead tended to defer to the procuracy in
investigating the misconduct of their members. A 1947 report from the Commission of Party
Control (KPK) in Moscow even illustrated the passivity of local party organs with a case
involving a communist accused of killing his own son, pointing out thatfar from blocking
his prosecutionthe raikom and obkom had ignored the case completely until after the
mans trial. The report concluded that raikomy, gorkomy, and obkomy of the Communist
Party of Kazakhstan do not conduct party investigations in the cases of communists accused
of a criminal offence, but decide the question of these communists party membership in
dependence on the results of examinations by the judicial-investigatory organs.3 KPK
ofcials issued similar reports in the years that followed.4
Conicts like this were not limited to Kazakhstan or Central Asia; from 1945 to 1953,
procuracy ofcials from across the Soviet Union charged that local party organs were
systematically shielding communists from prosecution, while party control ofcials berated
the same party organs for being overly deferential toward prosecutors. The prosecutors case
was exemplied by a 1949 report on the situation in one region by G. N. Safonov (the USSRs
Procurator-General), who complained that there are, in essence, two criminal codes [in
Kostroma Province], one for communists and another for everyone else. There have been a
number of instances where, for one and the same crime, the party member remains free while
the non-communist languishes in prison.5 Party control ofcials, on the other hand, charged
that obkomy and raikomy were largely unaware of the details of their members behaviour.
Instead of organising their own investigations and using censure and expulsion as tools to
shape the values and behaviour of party members, they allowed the procuracy to prosecute
any communists they wanted and then merely expelled whichever party members the courts
had convicted. A report on party discipline from Murmansk lambasted party organs for
mechanically re-writ[ing] the decisions of the court, without investigating the essence of the
case,6 for example, while a 1947 KPK report from Voronezh found that 60.8% of the
communists expelled for corruption there had been sentenced to prison before the party had
judged them. This led the obkom bureau in Voronezh to denounce the provinces raikomy for
plac[ing] the consideration of the question of Communists party status in direct dependence
on the decisions of judicial-investigatory organs.7
2

GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 13, l. 14.

Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (hereafter RGANI) f. 6, o. 6, d. 795, l. 15.
4
See, for example, RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 795, ll. 59 74 (for 1951).
5
GARF f. 8131, o. 27, d. 4668, l. 126. Thanks to Yoram Gorlizki for sharing information on this delo.
6
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsialno-politicheskoi istorii (hereafter RGASPI) f. 17, o. 122, d.
190, l. 122.
7
RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 200, ll. 39 40.
3

1914

EDWARD D. COHN

At rst glance, this dispute may seem like a petty turf wara power struggle between
prosecutors and party committees over who had the right to judge the behaviour of
communists, at a time when draconian post-war campaigns against economic theft, bribery
and other crimes made the consequences of prosecution especially high.8 This view is
sometimes accurate, since both prosecutors and party ofcials were at times driven by a
need to defend their parochial interests, but their dispute nevertheless casts light on two
important issues from the historical literature on late Stalinism: the changing internal
dynamics of the Communist Party and the regimes attitude toward corruption and other
administrative wrongdoing. In recent years, historians like Cynthia Hooper (2003, 2006)
and James Heinzen (2006, 2007) have argued that the late Stalin era was a turning point in
the history of Soviet anti-corruption efforts. Both scholars have suggested that the regimes
interest in combating corruption had fallen signicantly, and Hooper has argued that a
widespread and tacit understanding arose between the regime and its local representatives at
this time, grounded in a qualied indulgence of corrupt activities on the part of Soviet elites
and a redenition of the rules of party and state control sufcient to protect these elites from
overly vigilant public scrutiny or unauthorised prosecution (Hooper 2006, pp. 143 44).
The dispute between prosecutors and party organs, then, casts light on the internal workings
of the Communist Party, on the nature of the new Soviet elite, and on the Soviet regimes
attitude toward corruption at a key moment in the USSRs history.
In short, Soviet archival documents reveal that there was a broad consensus under post
war Stalinism that conict was growing between local party committees and procuracy
ofcials; there was no agreement, however, on whether party committees were overly
aggressive or overly passive in their attitude toward the judicial system. This article will
therefore seek both to reconcile the rival claims of prosecutors and party control ofcials
and to cast new light on how local leaders viewed the problems of criminality and corruption
within the partys ranks. Prosecutors, by and large, were correct when they suggested that
some party organs were interfering blatantly in specic court cases, especially those
involving high-ranking ofcials, but they sometimes exaggerated the extent to which the
party was systematically involving itself in the criminal justice system. More often than not,
local party organs were too disorganised, too inexperienced and (in many cases) too
incompetent to intervene regularly in the work of the courts; abuses did occur, and with
greater frequency than party ofcials admitted, but raikomy and gorkomy were often more
likely to be unaware of the crimes committed by their members than they were to intervene
in a specic case to help a communist avoid jail time. Between 1945 and 1953, factors such
as the recent admission (and relative inexperience) of many local party leaders, the rapid
reorganisation of many party organs, the gargantuan economic problems facing the USSR,
and the increasing self-identication of the party membership with the countrys
administrative elite helped ensure that district and provincial party committees would
largely cease overseeing the economic and political activities of local ofceholders,
allowing a culture of corruption to emerge within local party organisations that would
arguably grow in the decades after 1953. The changing political scene of the late Stalin era
thus gave certain local leaders the opportunity to intervene in the courts to protect their
friends, but the dominant story of party procuracy relations in the late Stalin era involved

See Solomon (1996), Gorlizki (1999) and Hachten (2005) for more on these campaigns.

POLICING THE PARTY

1915

the inaction, inexperience and disengagement of local party organs in the oversight of
economic and administrative wrongdoing.9
Party and procuracy after the purges
In principle, the inconvenient fact that thousands of communists were being accused of
theft, malfeasance and other troubling offences in the post-war USSR should not have led to
serious problems, since the countrys jurists and party ofcials agreed on the principles
underlying the relationship between criminal justice and party discipline. Every Soviet
citizen was subject to the law and would be tried in court if he or she committed a crime;
communists who broke the law would be both prosecuted and subjected to a party
investigation (ending with a censure or expulsion, in addition to any legal penalties);
investigations by the courts and the party would be completely independent of each other.
This system included its share of vagueness and ambiguity, however. For one thing, the
Communist Party claimed an amorphous role in directing the work of the judicial system,
which lent itself to abuses;10 for another, the regulations governing party state relations
were poorly understood innovations of recent vintage (Gorlizki 1997). As a result, the
system was at great risk of instability when the regimes post-war efforts to bolster its
control over the economy threatened to swamp the judicial system with new defendants and
to threaten members of the countrys party elite.
When it came to deciding the fate of communists accused of a crime, the rules of the game
were largely determined by two documents from the 1930s. The rst was a March 1936
resolution of the third plenum of the KPK, which declared that:
party members, just like non-members, are responsible under Soviet law for crimes they commit
before the state. A party punishment and in particular expulsion from the party are the most severe
forms of punishment for a Bolshevik, but this penalty cannot in any way replace a punishment
which is levied in court or in an administrative manner.

But the document went on to conclude that when a communist was punished by the court
system, the party should then investigate his conduct; as this suggests, until the 1930s there
was not an iron-clad rule that communists should have their fate decided by the party before
their day in court.11 The second document was a joint resolution On Sanctioning Arrests,
issued by the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers on 1 December 1938. This
resolution, a response to the Great Terror, was intended to prevent the arbitrary arrest of
party members and to end the indignity whereby communists were sent to jail before party
organs had had the chance to expel them. Its main provision required that procuracy ofcials
get the written sanction (sanktsiya) of a raikom secretary before a communist could be taken
9

See Solomon 1996 (pp. 29-30) for a discussion of the differences between economic crimes and
administrative crimes. This article will discuss the general theme of party interventions in criminal cases,
regardless of the type of offence committed; following the 1946 and 1947 decrees discussed below, a majority
of interventions seem to have dealt either with administrative crimes or with property crimes committed by
state and party administrators.
10
See Solomon (1992) and Sharlet (1979).
11
RGANI f. 6, o. 1, d. 12, l. 12. Also discussed in Gorlizki (1997, p. 280). See RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 200,
l. 40 for a rare party report (from 1947) which criticised a party organ for violating the KPKs 1936 plenum
resolution, compared to dozens of reports denouncing party committees for failing to discipline law-breaking
communists until after their prosecution.

1916

EDWARD D. COHN

into custody. (The arrest of high-ranking ofcials in Moscow would require the sanction of
the party secretariat.) As Yoram Gorlizki has noted, the resolution was based on the
assumption that party organs would routinely approve any reasonable arrest request, but
some party chairmen construed it as blanket permission to block prosecutions until after the
party had decided a communists fate (Gorlizki 1997, p. 280).
Rather than clarify the relationship between party and procuracy, these rules injected much
ambiguity into the process. These regulations were still new in the years following World War
II, and the 1938 resolution could be seen as contradicting the KPKs resolution of 1936;
moreover, the end of the war resulted in the appointment of large numbers of new party ofcials,
many of them inexperienced World War II veterans, which forced thousands of new personnel
in both party and procuracy to undergo rapid on-the-job training. In addition, the economic
devastation left by World War II helped spur a series of sweeping campaigns against theft,
bribery and other offences that led to thousands of arrests, targeting ordinary citizens and party
members alike. This made the procuracy an important tool of the regime in reconstructing
society, largely through the prosecution of citizens for violating laws on theft, bribery, and other
forms of corruption and economic malfeasance. Many of the citizens prosecuted under these
decrees were rank-and-le workers or kolkhozniki, but others were higher-ranking economic
administrators or government ofcials; many defendants, then, were members of the
Communist Party, and their prosecution quickly raised the ire of local party committees.
One of the regimes rst campaigns for tighter economic control began on 19 September
1946, when the USSRs top state and party organsthe Council of Ministers and the Central
Committeeannounced a decree On the Liquidation of Violations of the Agricultural
Artel Charter on Kolkhozy. This decree denounced the incorrect expenditure of labourdays, the misappropriation of kolkhoz land, the pilfering (rastaskivanie) of kolkhoz property,
and abuses by local ofcials and administrators.12 The decree was especially harsh in its
criticism of ofcials guilty of taking, for free or at a lowered price, kolkhoz livestock, grain,
seeds, feed, meat, milk, butter, honey, vegetables, fruits, and so on, noting, These facts
suggest that some workers with responsibility, abusing their position, have entered a path of
arbitrary rule [ proizvol ] and lawlessness in relation to collective farms, and have begun,
without any shame, to treat kolkhoz property as if it came from their own pocket.13
The decree urged the prosecution of administrators and ofcials who stole from the
kolkhoz and of kolkhoz chairmen who violated their farms supposedly democratic norms
two groups whose prosecution would frequently lead to conicts with the party. The report
by Nabatov discussed in this articles introduction specically complained about party
interventions in cases brought about by the 19 September 1946 decree.14
Less than a year later, on 4 June 1947, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet announced
two more decrees on property crimes, known by the titles On Criminal Liability for the
Theft of State and Social Property and On Strengthening the Personal Property of
Citizens, respectively.15 The effect of these laws was to toughen penalties for theft: the
12
The text of the decree, entitled O merakh po likvidatsii narushenii Ustava selskokhozyaistvennoi arteli
v kolkhozakh, was printed in many publications, including Bolshevik (September 1946), 17/18, pp. 66 70.
13
O merakh po likvidatsii narushenii Ustava selskokhozyaistvennoi arteli v kolkhozakh, pp. 67 68.
14
GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 13, l. 14.
15
For the text of the laws, Ob ugolovnoi otvetstvennosti za khishchenie gosudarstvennogo i
obshchestvennogo imushchestva, Ukaz Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR ot 4 iyuniya 1947g., and
Ob usilenii okhrany lichnoi sobstvennosti grazhdan, Ukaz Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR ot 4
iyuniya 1947g, see Goliakov (1953, pp. 430 31).

POLICING THE PARTY

1917

minimum penalty for the theft of state property was raised from three months to seven years
in prison, for example, while the minimum sentence for stealing private property rose from
three months to between ve and six years. For the theft of large amounts of money, or for
thefts involving an organised group, the penalty could rise as high as a 25-year prison
sentencea devastatingly harsh punishment in a country where murder was punished with a
sentence of between eight and ten years, and where bribery was often punished by twoyears deprivation of freedom. Before the decrees, there had been widespread agreement
among government ofcials that the law on theft needed to be made stricter; after the
promulgation of these laws, some ofcials rounded up thousands of suspects to prove their
compliance with government policy, while others desperately sought ways to soften the
laws impact. A total of two million people fell victim to the decrees in court in a draconian
campaign studied by Filtzer (2002, pp. 25354), Hachten (2005, pp. 369407) and
Solomon (1996, pp. 405, 413, 42739).
These were not the only late Stalinist campaigns against offenders whose actions
threatened the economic recovery, of course: after 1945, the regime also launched
campaigns against negligence and bribery (Cohn 2007; Heinzen 2006). This meant that the
regime was pursuing a wide variety of different offences through its campaigns to bolster
top-down state control over the economyoffences that could vary greatly in their
seriousness and their motivation. Some defendants were collective farmers and factory
workers accused of committing petty acts of theft; others were high-ranking ofcials
accused of incompetence, negligence and corruption. In fact, the very same decrees could
simultaneously target very different defendants accused of very different crimes: the theft
decree resulted in the prosecution of rank-and-le kolkhozniki accused of stealing small
items from collective farms (for instance, a peasant who stole 22 kilograms of rye and a
security guard who took nine sacks of grain),16 but also led to the imprisonment of local
ofcials on charges indistinguishable from political corruption (for example, the case of a
village soviet chairman who stole 13,475 rubles, with help from the council secretary).17
One result of the late Stalinist criminal campaigns, then, was an upsurge in the prosecution
of defendants whose actions threatened the regimes efforts to bolster its control over the
economy. These campaigns targeted some offences that would have been considered
corruption or white-collar crime in the West and others that were far pettier in nature,
encompassing a wide variety of offenders, motivations and actions.
Under these circumstances, it is no wonder that the procuracy ended up pursuing cases
against a large number of communists; one effect of the late Stalinist campaign against
economic wrongdoing was an upsurge in the arrest of party members, for a variety of
reasons. Some of the defendants resulting from these decrees were ofcials accused of
embezzlement, bribery or another traditional form of corruption. Others were starving
collective farmers desperate for food, or factory workers who sought to prot from their
job. Kolkhoz chairmen accused of pilfering goods from their collective farms were

16
Tverskoi tsentr dokumentatsii noveishei istorii (hereafter TTsDNI) f. 147, o. 4, d. 551, l. 195, and
TTsDNI f. 147, o. 4, d. 551, l. 172.
17
TTsDNI f. 147, o. 4, d. 1522, l. 124.

1918

EDWARD D. COHN

especially likely to be prosecuted (under either the theft decree or the decree on the
artel charter); this led, in turn, to a spike in the partys expulsion rate in rural areas. In
1950, for example, 10% of the communists expelled in the Velikolukskaya oblast were
kolkhoz chairmen accused of stealing either money or produce from their own collective
farms.18 Offences like these constituted a grey area between political corruption and
petty theft, showing the complexity of the states campaign for economic control. The
problem proved so large that the courts and the party even began to investigate
procuracy ofcials sent to the countryside to ght theft, who had been bribed with
vegetables to overlook wrongdoing.19 Taken as a whole, then, the economic decrees of
the late 1940s led to an upsurge in the prosecution of communists, many of whom were
accused of a group of loosely connected offences that threatened the regimes economic
objectives.
Although the precise impact of the regimes new decrees on the Communist Party is
difcult to determine, several party reports give an overall sense of the problem. A KPK
report from 1951, for example, noted that 234,532 communists had been expelled for
abusing their job since 1939, for a yearly average of 18,040 expulsions;20 every year
between 1945 and 1953, meanwhile, the party expelled between 30,000 and 70,000 people
accused of a catch-all category including the misuse of a service position (zloupotreblenie
sluzhebnym polozheniem), moral degeneration (moralnoe razlozhenie), drunkenness and
hooliganism. Moreover, the number of expulsions from the party for these offences rose
sharply just after the promulgation of state decrees against economic offences, jumping
from 37,904 in 1946 to 55,439 in 1947 and 68,516 in 1948, before levelling off.21 Cohn
(2007) has argued that the number of communists expelled from the party under post-war
Stalinism for violating state decrees on economic wrongdoing totalled at least 25,000
30,000 each year (a fact, as we shall see, that many procuracy ofcials ignored in their
reports on party interference). A 1952 report from Kalinin shows the full extent of the
problem on the local level. Embezzlement on kolkhozy, sovkhozy and industrial enterprises
led to the loss of 2.5 million rubles each year, reported a member of the KPK party
collegium in Moscow; just 29 kolkhoz chairmen had stolen 300,000 rubles worth of money
and goods. The KPK was especially worried by the fact that 11% of the people convicted of
embezzlement and corruption (rastrata i zloupotreblenie) in the province in 1951 were
members of the party.22
Together, these cases created a major crisis for party ofcials throughout the country. The
partys interventions in the court system were not limited to cases under late Stalinist
campaigns against economic and property crimes by any means, since local party
committees also intervened to protect members accused of hooliganism and other acts of
violence. But the late Stalin eras drive to stamp out corruption and property crime
nevertheless helped set the stage for a confrontation between party and procuracy in the
years that followed.

18

RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 782, l. 4.
See, for example, RGANI f. 6, o. 3, d. 12, l. 128.
20
RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 6, l. 7.
21
See RGANI f. 77, o. 1, d. 5, l. 166, and d. 6, ll. 73 and 174.
22
RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 796, l. 25.
19

POLICING THE PARTY

1919

The prosecutors lament

In May 1946, a prosecutor named Sukhov from Saratov Province wrote a complaint to
the USSRs Procurator-General that neatly encapsulated the concerns of prosecutors
from across the USSR. Sukhov, a World War II veteran, had been demobilised from
the Red Army in March 1946 and assigned a position in the provincial procuracy, and
his problems began when he tried to prosecute a kolkhoz chairman and a kolkhoz
accountant for embezzlement. The raikom voted to give each man a censure and
refused to expel them from the party or to sanction their prosecution, and its secretary
told Sukhov that without his permission, the procuracy could not carry out its functions
and that the procuracy was under the command of the raikom alone. When I cited
sections 117 and 121 of the Stalin Constitution, Secretary Polynin answered that for
him this was not the law, but the law for him was the party charter.23
Sukhovs letter concerned the Procurator-General enough that he soon sent a report to the
Central Committee complaining of the treatment of Sukhov, of a Mordovian district
prosecutor expelled from the party after trying to prosecute local politicians for corruption,
and of several Lithuanian and Kazakh procurators who also tried to prosecute kolkhoz
chairmen and other inuential local communists.24
Although the details of Sukhovs case are not all clear, his complaint suggests that the
inexperience of new procuracy and party ofcials was a factor that contributed to his
troubles; more importantly, his clash with the procuracy illustrated the importance of cases
dealing with corruption and theft in late Stalinist state party relations. In the years that
followed, prosecutors complained about interference by local party organs in nearly every
region of the country; in 1948 alone, the Procurator-General in Moscow received complaints
from ofcials in Ulyanov, Yaroslavl, Saratov, Dnepropetrovsk, Poltava, Krasnodar, Omsk,
Tomsk, Kursk, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.25 A majority of these
complaints dealt with the actions of raikomy from rural regions and a disproportionate
number came from Central Asia or Siberia, but the procuracy also received complaints from
major cities in Russia and Ukraine. Moreover, a large majority of these cases dealt with
petty corruption and similar administrative offences that were often punishable under the
1946 and 1947 decrees; a signicant number of the communists whose prosecution was
being blocked by their raikom were kolkhoz chairmen, and a majority were local party or
state ofcials or economic administrators who engaged in some form of theft or corruption.
On relatively rare occasions, a provincial or territorial party committee (obkom or kraikom)
announced a policy for all the raikomy it oversaw whereby communists could not be arrested
until the party had decided their fate.26
Several representative complaints highlight the concerns of procuracy ofcials.
According to a 1946 KPK report from Dagestan, the raikom and obkom there had refused
to expel a kolkhoz chairman from the party or to allow his prosecution until a KPK
plenipotentiary got involved in the case; even after the expulsion, however, the district
procurator still failed to prosecute him, fearing to spoil his relations with the raikom

23

GARF f. 8131, o. 37, d. 2818, l. 2.

GARF f. 8131, o. 37, d. 2818, ll. 21 22.
25
GARF f. 8131, o. 29, d. 11.
26
See GARF f. 8131, o. 29, d. 11, ll. 100 3, for such a case from Krasnodar.
24

1920

EDWARD D. COHN

secretary.27 As a result of complaints from the republics procurator, the Central Committee
of the Uzbek SSR passed a resolution in March 1948 denouncing the Khorezmskii obkom
and several raikomy for violating the 1938 resolution On Sanctioning Arrests by refusing
to allow communists to be prosecuted.
As a result of incorrect leadership of the procuracy and the courts on the part of the party organs of
Khorezmskaya province and a lack of oversight of the implementation of important directives of the
party and state in the areas of struggle with the squanderers of socialist property, speculation, and
violations of the agricultural artel charter [the obkom announced], the local organs of the procuracy
and the courts for a long time weakened the struggle with criminality, and several displayed a lack
of principle in their work.28

These examples are typical of the conict between prosecutors and party organs for most
of the period from 1946 to 1951, but in late 1952, prosecutors from across the USSR began
reporting on a new wave of attempts by party committees to interfere in the prosecution of
communists. That October, the Communist Partys Nineteenth Congress had added a new
provision to the party charter: In those cases when a party member has committed an
offence punishable in a court of law, the revised Paragraph 13 declared, he is expelled
from the party with a report on the offence to the administrative and judicial authorities.29
Within weeks, many local party secretaries had begun to argue that this article forbade the
prosecution of any communist until the party had decided his fate, as a Latvian procuracy
ofcial complained to Safonov in December 1952.30 In Irkutsk, the provincial head of the
upravlenie of the justice ministry (acting at the urging of the obkom) instructed all of the
peoples judges in the region not to pursue the cases of any communists or candidate party
members who had not yet been judged by their raikom and obkom. This order had resulted in
a slow-down of prosecutions and was giving accused communists the opportunity to destroy
evidence before their case could be tried in court, the acting procurator of Irkutsk reported to
Moscow.31 A Belorussian provincial prosecutor even reported that his local obkom secretary
had threatened his censure or expulsion if he decided to prosecute communists in violation
of Paragraph 13.32
A prosecutor from Astrakhan sent Safonov a representative complaint dating from this
period. On 23 February 1953, he reported, Astrakhans gorkom secretary had convened a
meeting of all the district procurators, peoples judges, provincial court chairmen and other
local judicial ofcials: Opening the meeting, the secretary of the gorkom literally word-for
word [bukvalno doslovno ] announced the goal of this meetingto explain to all present the
meaning of Paragraph 13 of the Charter of the CPSU and the order of its application. That
meaning left little room for debate: Not one member of the party or candidate member
could be brought to criminal responsibility by the procuracy or a judge until the question had
been decided by a party organ, that is, beginning with the primary party organisation and
ending with the obkom, the gorkom secretary announced.33 The Astrakhan prosecutor soon
27

RGASPI f. 17, o. 121, d. 463, ll. 54 55.

GARF f. 8131, o. 29, d. 11, ll. 1 14.
29
Ustav Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soyuza, Pravda, 14 October 1952, p. 1.
30
GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 2236, l. 5.
31
GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 2236, ll. 14 16.
32
GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 2236, ll. 119.
33
GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 2236, ll. 26 27.
28

POLICING THE PARTY

1921

sent a second letter to Safonov, noting that the provinces obkom secretary had held a similar
meeting on 21 March making the same points to a wider audience.34 These orders threatened
to bring the procuracys work to a standstill.
These complaints from the provinces were summarised by at least two reports sent to the
Central Committee by law enforcement ofcials in Moscow. In February 1953, one of the
USSRs deputy justice ministers sent the Central Committee a report declaring that upon
the consideration of several criminal cases by the courts of various union republics, there
have been cases of incorrect interference by party organs, impeding the timely and correct
resolution of these cases.35 The report went on to give six representative examples of party
organs that refused to sanction the arrest of their members. A raikom secretary from Kirov
province claimed that because an accused communist had only presented himself in a
favourable light, the committee had given him a reprimand, and refused the procuracy
permission to prosecute him for hooliganism; for over two years, an obkom party collegium
from Uzbekistan prevented the prosecution of a mine director for embezzlement by
claiming that it had not had time to decide his case; every case either led to a long delay
before the accused communist could be prosecuted or resulted in the dropping of charges
against him.36 Then, in May 1953, just after the death of Stalin, Procurator-General Safonov
wrote a similar report to Nikita Khrushchev. Commenting on the 1938 resolution on arrests,
he declared,
Neither this resolution nor any other resolutions of the Central Committee established any sort of
special procedure for the investigation or for bringing criminal charges against Communists, and
did not introduce any sort of special guarantee for members of the party. On the contrary, a number
of party decisions have said that members of the party are just as responsible for crimes before the
Soviet state as non-members.37

The 1938 resolution was meant to prevent illegal arrests like those that occurred during the
Great Purges, Safonov argued, not to give special rights to party members; he focused his
criticism on efforts by party organs to use the 1952 revisions to the party charter to prevent
the prosecution of communists.38
Reports like these made the procuracys position clear: party intervention was a regular
(even systematic) problem that threatened the legitimacy and effectiveness of the criminal
justice system. Reports by the procuracy make it exceedingly difcult to measure the extent
of party interference, however. In most instances, local prosecutors wrote to the procuracy
or the justice ministry with a brief list of communists who had managed to avoid
prosecution; they announced that these cases represented a major problem, but failed to
provide any statistics on the prosecution of communists. Moreover, in some cases where
prosecutors did provide statistics on the problem, their data did not back up their conclusions
about party interference. In 1948, for example, the chief procurator of the USSRs railroad
system wrote a report to Moscow alleging that his ofces relationship with party organs had
broken down over the partys failure to sanction arrests. From January to August 1948, he
34

GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 2236, l. 28.

RGANI f. 5, o. 15, d. 411, l. 27.
36
RGANI f. 5, o. 15, d. 411, ll. 28 31.
37
GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 2236, l. 116.
38
Draft report found in GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 2236, ll. 116 22.
35

1922

EDWARD D. COHN

wrote, 1,511 workers in the railroad were known to have broken the law, of whom 779 (or
51.5%) were party members; of that total, 1,242 people (including 636 communists) were
convicted.39 These statistics suggest that the problem was much smaller than procuracy
ofcials claimed, however. In all, 82.79% of the non-communists accused of breaking the
law were brought to justice, compared to 81.64% of party members. According to the
prosecutors own data, party membership resulted in a decline in the conviction rate of only
1.15%.
Other statistics hinted at a larger problem, but were less convincing than procuracy
ofcials believed, especially when viewed in conjunction with other statistical reports.
A 1949 report from Yaroslavl noted that 501 communists had been charged with a
crime the year before, but that only 177 had actually been arrested; the arrest rate was
typically between 44% and 67% in cities (with a 1948 rate of 44% in Yaroslavl itself
and 67% in Shcherbakov), but it fell dramatically in certain rural areas. For example, 42
communists had been charged with a crime but none had been arrested in the Tutaevskii
raion.40 This report suggests that party interference was a problem everywhere in the
province, and an especially severe problem in agricultural regions; it is unclear how
representative the report was of the USSR as a whole, however, and it is far from
certain that the arrest rate would have reached 100% in the absence of party
interventions. As the next section of this article will show, moreover, other data
complicate the procuracys case: a 1950 KPK report from Yaroslavl detailed the cases
of hundreds of communists who had been prosecuted for corruption long before the
party had judged their cases. Of 519 communists expelled for theft, waste and the abuse
of a service position in Yaroslavl in 1949 and early 1950, 17 had been convicted in
1944 1946, 55 in 1947 and 204 in 1948.41 There was nothing stopping party organs
from blocking the prosecution of some communists without noticing that others had
been sent to jail, of course, but if nothing else, these data suggest that the party was not
systematically blocking prosecutions.
Taken together, these reports suggest several conclusions about the interference of party
organs in the courts. First, a small minority of party raikomy and obkomy seems to have
attempted to intervene systematically in cases where communists were accused of a crime,
especially after the Nineteenth Party Congress; these party organs were apparently few in
number, but constituted a real problem nonetheless. Second, cases of party interference
seem to have been more likely to arise in rural or peripheral parts of the USSR. Although
abuses occurred everywhere, they were less likely close to a major city and more likely in
Siberia and Central Asia than in European Russia, suggesting that greater distances from the
centre led to less oversight from Moscow, to more poorly trained party and procuracy
personnel, or to greater de facto autonomy for local ofcials. (The importance of new
decrees about theft and the kolkhoz also presumably led to greater issues in rural areas.)
Third, well-connected communists seem to have been more likely to be protected than less
inuential party members, and could be shielded from prosecution anywhere in the USSR.
Finally, a majority of party interventions centred around corruption, administrative
offences, and other illicit acts by local ofcials. This may simply have been a sign of the
39

GARF f. 8131, o. 29, d. 11, l. 218. (For the full report, see ll. 123 219.)
GARF f. 8131, o. 29, d. 11, ll. 43 44.
41
RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 837, l. 8.
40

POLICING THE PARTY

1923

importance of the theft decrees: although statistics on party intervention are scarce, the
proportion of protected communists accused of theft seems to be roughly proportional to the
percentage of communists accused of a criminal offence who were expelled from the party
for theft. Nevertheless, this fact shows that the enforcement of the regimes post-war
economic decrees had become a source of tensions between local procuracy and party
ofcials, a fact of considerable signicance in late Stalinist politics.
The party strikes back
In the summer of 1949, two Communist Party ofcialsan instructor from the Central
Committees department of party, trade union and komsomol organs, and an assistant to a
member of the KPKs party collegiumsent the KPK a detailed report on the party
discipline process in Pskov Province. Their conclusions touched on a number of themes, but
one stood out: they were sharply critical of the obkoms handling of communists who had
committed crimes. In 1948 and early 1949, the report found, 350 communists had been
convicted of a criminal offence, and 215 were given prison sentences; nevertheless, the
party had only investigated 129 of those communists (or 37%).42 This was a sign, the report
declared, of several serious problems, including a passive approach to the oversight of
communists misconduct and an indifferent attitude toward the work of the procuracy. In
a majority of cases, the arrests of Communists and the raising of criminal prosecutions
against them take place, contrary to existing procedures, without the sanction of party
organs, the report declared.43 The result was an embarrassment to the party. The report
even noted that a high-ranking ofcial of the local milk administration was serving a tenyear jail sentence for theft; he remained in the party and even had his party card with him in
prison.44
Some of the details of the KPK report on Pskov province are unconvincing: its authors
often suggested that local communists were innocent victims of unscrupulous prosecutors,
but many of them were presumably guilty of the accusations against them. The report went
on to allege that many procuracy ofcials were corrupt or engaged in drunkenness and to
argue that raikomy and the obkom of the party are providing weak leadership to the primary
party organisations of judicial investigatory organs and the procuracy, suggesting that the
party needed to play a more assertive role in deciding which criminals would be prosecuted.
Nevertheless, the report is more compelling in its portrayal of a disengaged and ineffective
party organisation, whose leaders most likely did not even know that they had the power to
deny the procuracy permission to arrest local communists. Local party leaders consistently
missed deadlines, heard party discipline cases in the absence of the accused, failed to
educate their members about their responsibilities as communists, and violated party rules
and regulations in countless other ways that were unrelated to the procuracy.45
This report was typical of the attitudes of party control ofcials from across the USSR.
First, control ofcials alleged that thousands of party members were being prosecuted by
ofcials of the procuracy. Second, they argued that party organisations were failing to
protect these members from arrest: in some cases they did not prevent the arrest of
42

RGANI f. 6,
RGANI f. 6,
44
RGANI f. 6,
45
RGANI f. 6,
43

o. 6, d.
o. 6, d.
o. 6, d.
o. 6, d.

819, l. 4.
819, l. 4.
819, l. 4.
819, ll. 4 5.

1924

EDWARD D. COHN

communists whose detention had not been sanctioned by the party, but they more often
agreed systematically to sanction members arrests without conducting their own
investigation. Third, KPK ofcials suggested that many communists were expelled for a
criminal offence based solely on their criminal conviction, with no party investigation, no
internal discussion, no participation by the party organ, and no effort to use the case to
educate the accused communist and the other members of the party organisations. In 1950,
for example, the Velikolukskii obkom expelled 234 communists for embezzlement and the
abuse of a job for personal gain; 175 of them (74.7%) were already serving time in jail at that
time. Sometimes party organs nd out about the prosecution of a Communist 2 3 years
after his conviction, the report concluded, giving two examples: a communist whose case
was heard by the raikom three years after his conviction and 2.5 years after his release from
prison, and another communist expelled from the party two years after his seven-year jail
sentence was announced. This speaks to the fact that party organs have quit paying
attention to the party investigation of the cases of Communists accused of a legal offence,
wholly entrusting the fate of Communists to the investigatory organs, the report
concluded.46
Other KPK investigators reached the same conclusion. One representative complaint
came from Voronezh, which was experiencing an upsurge in expulsions in 1946 and 1947.
The obkom there expelled 310 communists in 1946, 38% of them for theft or the abuse of
their position; in the rst four months of 1947 alone, the committee had expelled 449
communists, roughly 40% of them for the same two offences. Moreover, 222 party members
had been convicted of a crime in early 1947, and a clear majority (135, or 60.8%) had been
prosecuted before party organs could judge them. The obkom bureau therefore denounced
district committees for plac[ing] the consideration of the question of communists party
status in direct dependence on the decisions of judicial-investigatory organs.47 A report
from the Primorskii territory found that the kraikom there often considered the party status
of communists only after their fate had been decided in court, thereby depriv[ing]
Communists of the right, guaranteed by the party charter, to be present at the discussion of
his party position and to give his own account of the matter.48 A majority of KPK reports
gave similarly vague descriptions of the problem, but others were far more specic in
detailing the negligence of the party. Of the 519 communists expelled for waste, theft and
abuse of a service position in Iaroslavl province in 1949 and the rst half of 1950, for
example, 17 had been convicted between 1944 and 1946, 55 in 1947 and 204 in 1948.49 A
1946 report from Murmansk, nally, noted a sharp rise in the number of expulsions, 70% of
which dealt with the abuse of a job, a theft or the violation of labour discipline. Questions
about the party membership of Communists accused of committing criminal offences are as
a rule examined by party organs only after the resolution of the cases by judicial organs, a
KPK ofcial complained, accusing party organs of mechanically re-writ[ing] the decisions
of the court, without investigating the essence of the case.50
Many KPK reports coupled their portrait of complacent party organs with an image of
unscrupulous, power-mad prosecutors, determined to meet their prosecution quotas under
46

RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 782, l. 3.
RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 200, ll. 39 40.
48
RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 818, ll. 1 2.
49
RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 837, l. 8.
50
RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 190, l. 122.
47

POLICING THE PARTY

1925

the draconian post-war criminal campaigns. In 1945, the KPK plenipotentiary for
Arkhangelsk province wrote a devastatingbut representativecritique of the obkoms
attitude toward communists accused of a criminal offence. Fifty of the 178 cases considered
by the obkom in the last quarter of 1944 dealt with communists serving time in jail, he
pointed out; in the rst quarter of 1945, 35 of the 74 communists expelled by the obkom
were already serving time in prison. The practice continues, whereby party raikoms give
the sanction to the procuracy to prosecute Communists for unimportant offences, and then
expel the Communists after their conviction, the plenipotentiary complained.51 There were
a number of problems with this approach. First, the KPK ofcial noted, the courts could not
always be trusted to come to the right conclusion: seven of the 50 communists expelled in
1945 had been wrongfully convicted or had received too high a sentence, and the party could
have helped them avoid this fate. Second, the party discipline process was intended not just
to punish errant communists or to purge the ranks of the unworthy, but to teach them a
lesson while educating their fellow party members; persuasion and education had a place
alongside punishment in the party discipline process, and the party was failing to achieve
this goal. (This was especially true in cases where the accused communist was tried in
absentiaa necessity in cases where he was serving time in jail.) Third, this sort of approach
to the problem led to the systematic violation of party rules and deadlines on the treatment of
the accused, who had the right to have his judgment decided quickly and to be present at the
hearing that decided his fate.52
In a representative example from the report, the obkom in Arkhangelsk had expelled a
storekeeper on a collective lumber farm after she was sentenced to a year in prison for waste
and theft. Comrade L was red after an audit at the store discovered a shortcoming of 1,604
rubles, 1.5 kilograms of sugar and 91 boxes of matches, according to the plenipotentiary.
However, the disappearance of these items was far more innocent than the courts had found:
Comrade L had taken some of the money when her boss failed to pay her for four months
and had loaned the rest to some friends in the same predicament. The apparent
disappearance of the sugar was due to a faulty set of scales; the matches had been taken by
other administrators of the lespromkhoz. In this way, there was no deliberate squandering of
products or embezzlement of money, the report concluded; Before sanctioning the
prosecution of Comrade L, a young candidate member of the party since 1943, the party
raikom could have set her right in time, limiting her punishment to a party penalty
[vzyskanie ] and not sending her to court or excluding her from the party.53
The Arkhangelsk report is difcult to interpret. A cynic might charge that the KPK
plenipotentiary was urging local party organs to protect their own at all costs. An idealist
might claim that this report is proof of communists belief in the partys power to change its
members habits and attitudes for the better, or that it was an unusually honest assessment of
the draconian Stalinist penal system. After all, many historianssuch as Filtzer (2002),
Hachten (2005) and Solomon (1996)agree that thousands of citizens were subjected to
onerous punishments for minor or nonexistent offences, especially when the anti-theft
decree was announced. The truth, most likely, is somewhere in between. Although the
language in KPK reports occasionally sounds like its straining to justify the protection of
51

RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 98, l. 52.

RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 98, l. 50.
53
RGASPI f. 17, o. 122, d. 98, l. 51.
52

1926

EDWARD D. COHN

communists from criminal charges, the report from Arkhangelsk was extreme in this
regardand many other reports provide evidence of incompetence and passivity on the part
of raikomy and obkomy that is difcult to refute.
Moreover, very few reports limited their critique of Soviet ofcialdom to the procuracy;
control ofcials were also extremely concerned by the declining vigilance of the party and
the near disappearance of party organs traditional watchdog role. It is also very bad that
malfeasance [zloupotreblenie ], embezzlement, and waste are, as a rule, uncovered by the
judicial-investigatory organs, and not by party organs or by Communists,54 declared a
report on the work of the KPK between 1939 and 1952, before continuing,
All of this swindling [moshennichestvo ] took place before the eyes of Communists, and ignoring it
was not in any way allowed. But none of the members of the party raised the question until one of
the criminals was arrested. . . . All these and other facts take place because party organisations do
not full the function of control over the economic activity of enterprises, and stand aloof from one
of their primary responsibilities.55

Another KPK report, issued the same year but concerning party discipline in Kalinin
Province, used nearly identical language to make the same point, repeating the sentence
beginning It is also very bad nearly word-for-word. The report added that expulsions
take place with no party review and the decision is based completely on the courts
sentence. As an example, it listed the case of a man expelled from the party more than a
year after he was sentenced to jail for stealing 11,000 rubles (ostensibly because he was
appealing the decision); no one spoke at the primary party organisation meeting that voted
to expel him, which mechanically endorsed expulsion with no involvement for local
communists.56
What are we to conclude from the reports of control ofcials about party attitudes toward
criminality? At their worst, party control ofcials sometimes endorsed efforts to block or
slow down the prosecution of criminals within the party, perhaps out of a desire to protect
communists, perhaps out of an exaggerated hope that party censures could help errant
communists mend their ways, and perhaps out of a more reasonable dislike of the regimes
draconian anti-crime campaigns. More often, however, control ofcials highlighted the
dismal state of Communist Party discipline and the disorganisation of local party organs.
Although there were surely abuses of the partys right to sanction arrests, most party
committees seem to have either blindly approved most arrest requests presented to them by
the procuracy or to have sat by passively while communists were arrested without
permission. The story of late Stalinist party procuracy relations, then, was dominated more
by the passivity of the party than by its blatant disregard for the rule of law.
Conclusion
As Gorlizki (1997) has shown, the Soviet political leadership decided to become involved in
this dispute soon after the death of Stalin, launching several often-ineffective campaigns
against party interference in the judicial system. The leaderships decision was presumably
54

RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 6, l. 8.
RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 6, ll. 11 12.
56
RGANI f. 6, o. 6, d. 796, l. 25.
55

POLICING THE PARTY

1927

shaped by procuracy reports on the problem; when a raikom in Tula voted to condemn a
judge named N. Ya. Tarakanova in October 1953 for her unwillingness to follow
instructions from the party, a wide array of national party gures quickly came to her
defence. According to the new Procurator-General, R. A. Rudenko, interference by the party
in specic criminal cases undermines the authority of the court and disorients judges,
forcing them to adopt illegal decisions and to violate the principle, established in the
constitution, of the independence of the courts and their subordination solely to the law
(Rudenko 1954). A Central Committee resolution denounced party interference in legal
cases in March 1954, and in October 1961, the Twenty-Second Party Congress voted to
amend the party charter, replacing the old Paragraph 13 with a new article declaring that, If
a member of the party commits an offence, punishable under the criminal code, he is
expelled from the party and prosecuted according to the law (Materialy 1962, p. 434). Party
and state ofcials unanimously reafrmed the principle that although the party would
continue to provide guidance to the court on the local level, interference in specic cases
would no longer be tolerated.
Khrushchev and his allies were surely correct to denounce party interference in the courts,
since even a small number of improper interventions could call the legitimacy of the court
system into question. Nevertheless, it remains unclear just how common party interference
in the judiciary actually was. Even a casual perusal of complaints from the procuracy
suggests that there were indeed abuses of the system by party ofcials, but Safonovs
warning about the existence of two criminal codes57 feels greatly overstated as an account
of the overall Soviet status quo. Peter Solomons analysis of oral history interviews,
moreover, suggests that although the Communist Party sometimes intervened in criminal
cases involving party members throughout Soviet history, direct interventions to block the
prosecution of party members were limited to the cases of big shots and important local
gures, even under post-war Stalinism (Solomon 1992, p. 9).
Two main factors seem to have determined whether local party organs intervened in a
criminal case. The rst, not surprisingly, was the attitude of the party committee
leadership. As reports from the procuracy show, certain obkom and raikom secretaries
were determined to maximise their own power and to defend the interests of the party at all
costs; only a handful of party committees seem to have tried to systematically block the
prosecution of communists, but they t this description perfectly. Committees like these
constituted a real problem, but were a small minority of the party overall. More
importantly, it appears that local party organs were more likely to intervene in the work of
the procuracy in rural areas than in urban areas, and in Central Asia and Siberia, rather
than in European Russia. One reason for this disparity may be that the theft and kolkhoz
decrees targeted rural areas more than urban centres, making arrests a priority high enough
for the procuracy to pursue even party members whose arrest was not sanctioned. (State
and party authorities were always more likely to crack down on corruption when the
corrupt act threatened an important initiative of the regime.58) Party committees in rural
locales and more far-ung regions of the USSR may also have been subject to less
oversight than urban committees, making it easier for them to exert themselves in
inappropriate ways.
57

GARF f. 8131, o. 27, d. 4668, l. 126.

See Cohn (2007).

58

1928

EDWARD D. COHN

Second, the status of the accused communist also helped to determine his fate. As a
general rule, for example, well-connected communists with high-ranking positions within
the party or state administration seem to have been more likely to be shielded from
prosecution when they broke the law; rank-and-le communists were also presumably less
likely to be prosecuted if they were well-connected within the party, although this
hypothesis is difcult to prove through archival evidence. Kolkhoz chairmen were a frequent
target of prosecution and expulsion, most likely because they held a thankless position
within the post-war Soviet economy: they had just enough importance to make them a
tempting target under the theft decrees, especially if their farms were not meeting their
production quotas, but they were not sufciently high-ranking to be safe from prosecution.
Some kolkhoz chairmenquite possibly the better-connected onestherefore featured
prominently in complaints about party interference, but many more were prosecuted for
economic crimes. Higher-ranking rural ofcials, within the raikom or the state
administration, seem to have been prosecuted less frequently.
Interestingly, the crime committed by a communist seems to have played a smaller role in
determining his fate. Communists who committed violent crimes like murder may well have
been shielded from prosecution less often than other offenders;59 still, the case of the
Kazakh man who killed his son (cited above) suggests that some party members accused of
violent offences were able to avoid prosecution. Moreover, at least some party ofcials
accused of rape and sexual misconduct were able to avoid arrest, although they often
managed to do so by exerting pressure from above to stop an investigation, not from a
refusal to sanction an arrest.60 In the early 1950s, the Central Committee in Moscow
received several reports about a Ukrainian kolkhoz director accused of engaging in petty
corruption, spreading gonorrhoea and rape; letters to Moscow complained that the raions
women were afraid to walk alone at night, for fear of the kolkhoz chairman, but when a
police investigator began looking into the charges, the raikom secretary called him into his
ofce and demanded, On what basis are you conducting an investigation without approving
the question with me?. Under pressure from Moscow, the obkom eventually voted to expel
the kolkhoz chairman (who was eventually prosecuted) and to give the raikom secretary a
strict reprimand.61 In a 1949 case from Molotov Province, meanwhile, a raikom ofcial
was accused of drunkenness, bigamy and the attempted rape of an under-aged girl; he
implausibly assured the raikom that [t]here was no attempt to rape the nurse, there was just
playing [balovstvo ], like with a child, ending up with only a reprimand.62 The raikom
ofcial was never prosecuted, and although it is not clear if the party intervened to protect
him, the raikom and obkom were willing to ignore serious allegations of wrongdoing
because of his supposedly heartfelt (chistoserdechnoe) confession. Overall, however, the
nature of a communists crime does not seem to have had a signicant effect on whether he
was shielded from prosecution; a majority of protected communists were accused of
59

In the rst half of 1952, for example, 47 communists were expelled in Molotov Province in 1952 for
crimes (theft, hooliganism, murder); a majority were probably expelled for hooliganism, but the inclusion of
murder in this list is instructive nonetheless. See Gosudarstvennyi obshchestvenno-politicheskii arkhiv
Permskoi oblasti (hereafter GOPAPO) f. 105, o. 18, d. 256a, l. 14. For two 1949 cases of communists expelled
by Molotovs obkom after committing murder, see GOPAPO f. 105, o. 203, d. 377, and f. 105, o. 203, d. 817.
60
See GARF f. 8131, o. 32, d. 13, ll. 5 and 28, for cases where prosecutors were denied permission to
prosecute communists accused of rape.
61
RGANI f. 5, o. 15, d. 441, ll. 235 38.
62
GOPAPO f. 105, o. 203, d. 492, l. 7.

POLICING THE PARTY

1929

administrative offences, but that was because most communists accused of a crime under
late Stalinism had allegedly committed offences like theft and embezzlement.
Taken together, then, the rival complaints of the procuracy and the party paint a
disturbing portrait of the post-war Stalinist regimes efforts to combat corruption and other
crimes. Reports from the procuracy show that the protection of communist ofcials from
prosecution was a very real problem, albeit a localised one at times. Reports from party
control ofcials, on the other hand, suggest that the disorganised, lackadaisical attitude of
many party organs was even more widespread: more often than not, party raikomy and
gorkomy seem to have been more likely not to notice if one of their members was prosecuted
than they were to block the prosecution of a local communist. This presumably made the
work of the late Stalinist judicial system more arbitrary, and the decline of party organs as an
investigatory force undoubtedly helped increase the level of corruption in post-war society,
as many party reports alleged. In this sense, the seemingly contradictory complaints of
prosecutors and party ofcials discussed in this article were both part of a larger problem:
the decline of the widespread vision that the Communist Party was to be a watchdog against
corruption and wrongdoing.
One trend in the recent research on post-war Stalinism has been to emphasise the
importance of that era in shaping the Soviet Unions approach to corruption and
administrative wrongdoing. Both Cynthia Hooper and James Heinzen have emphasised that
the period from 1945 to 1953 was a turning point in the growth of Soviet corruption, a trend
that would culminate in the corruption of the Brezhnev era, while Hooper (2006) argues that
the period witnessed a striking decline in state and party oversight of corruption.63 Ofcials
from both the procuracy and the KPK clearly believed that a change was taking place, both in
the number of corruption cases and in the partys attitude toward them, and their reports
suggest a likely explanation for why local party organs were losing their interest in pursuing
corruption and administrative crime: the problem was not so much that they were determined
to protect their members, as it was that they were largely disengaged from oversight to begin
with. Factors like the inexperience of local ofcials, the massive growth of the Communist
Party during the war (and hence the ignorance of new members about past party practices),
and the growing association of the party membership with the countrys administrative
apparatus helped make party members feel like members of the USSRs ruling elite, not like
part of a revolutionary vanguard with a watchdog role in society. The regimes effectiveness
in ghting corruption rose and fell at different times in the decades that followed, but once the
late Stalinist campaigns against property crime and administrative wrongdoing became a thing
of the past, many state and party ofcials became less interested in combating administrative
misconduct. The lackadaisical approach of many party committees continued, however,
making the corruption unearthed by procuracy ofcials in the 1940s and 1950s more accepted
as a part of Soviet life.
Grinnell College

63
This article largely agrees with Hoopers larger point about the partys declining interest in combating
corruption under post-war Stalinism, while suggesting that the elites protected from prosecution under late
Stalinism were not party members in general, but relatively high-ranking or well-connected communists.

1930

EDWARD D. COHN
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