Abstract

The operation of party congresses and conferences — considered in terms of decision-making mechanisms and the distribution of roles within the political elite — remains an understudied problem. In the USSR, party organs formed the core of the political system, and the principal questions of Soviet politics were addressed within the work of party congresses, conferences, plenums, and the Central Committee’s Politburo and Secretariat. Although the functions of all-party conferences were not specified in successive versions of the Party Rules, these forums were convened regularly in the 1920s and played an important role as institutions of horizontal integration within the political elite. V.I. Lenin held that broad party forums should shed their earlier “parliamentary” character and become more “business-like” meetings attentive to local experience and oriented toward practical questions. In the early 1920s, however, party conferences were marked by active discussion of theoretical issues and debates over the political line pursued by the RCP(b). Subsequently, free discussion of fundamental theoretical and political questions narrowed, in parallel with a growing number of reports and interventions devoted to concrete matters of party-organ work, party campaigns, and local and departmental concerns. These developments unfolded alongside the transformation of the party apparatus into a genuine vertical of power and the spread of appointment practices in staffing party posts. They were also shaped by the sociocultural profile of the party elite and by the process of “workerization” of party organs, which proceeded actively throughout the 1920s. The intense intra-party struggle of the decade fostered factional differentiation while simultaneously consolidating the majority of local workers represented at conferences around the dominant Central Committee grouping and the figure of I.V. Stalin. The outcome of these institutional and political shift s was the formation of a “totalitarian democracy,” characterized by the recruitment of leading bodies from “below,” an emphasis on collective procedures, and active delegate participation in debates over practical matters, combined with a predominantly ratificatory role in the discussion of the political line.