Abstract
The stabilisation of NEP in 1922 allowed for a more considered examination of policy. Socially isolated, the regime constituted, in M. Lewin’s phrase, ‘a dictatorship in the void’, its survival guaranteed only by the power of the party-state administration.1 The effectiveness of that apparatus became a major preoccupation of an insecure leadership. In the final months of his active life Lenin initiated a major reappraisal of the regime’s policies. A cornerstone of this legacy was his celebrated and ambitious plan to reorganize Rabkrin, an attempt fundamentally to rethink the organization of the proletarian dictatorship and to develop mechanisms to combat the tendencies towards authoritarianism and bureaucratic degeneration already manifest in the Soviet one-party state.
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Notes and References
M. Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle (London, 1973) ch. 1.
I. Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed (Oxford, 1970) pp. 35–7; 48–9.
M. Davydov, A.D. Tsyurupa (M., 1961) pp. 76–82.
Stalin took with him some control workers from NKRKI to the Secretariat including L.Z. Mekhlis. See Who Was Who in the USSR (Metuchen, N.J., 1972) p. 378.
S.N. Ikonnikov, Sozdanie i deyatel’nost’ ob”edinennykh organov TsKK-RKI v 1923–1934 gg. (M., 1971) p. 54;
N.A. Voskresenskaya, V.I. Lenin — organizator sotsialisticheskogo kontrolya (M., 1970) p. 232–40.
L.D. Trotsky. The Real Situation in Russia (London, n.d.) pp. 304–5, Trotsky, My Life (New York, 1970), pp. 478–9. Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, pp. 48–9.
On the origin and history of TsKK, see: I.M. Moskalenko, TsKK v bor’be za edinstvo i chistotu partinnykh ryadov (M., 1973).
I. English see P.M. Cocks, Politics of Party Control: The Historical and Institutional Role of Party Control Organs in the CPSU, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (Harvard University, 1968).
See also M. Neuveld, ‘The Origin of the Communist Control Commission’, The American Slavic and East European Review, vol. xviii, no. 3 (October 1959), pp. 315–33.
PSS, vol. 45, p. 389. For Lenin’s earlier clashes with Proletkult on the question of the ‘cultural revolution’, see C. Claudin-Urondo, Lenin and the Cultural Revolution (Brighton, 1977).
L.D. Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition 1923–1925 (New York, 1975) pp. 61–2. Trotsky, The Real Situation in Russia, pp. 301–2.
Trotsky, The Stalin School of Falsification (New York, 1972) pp. 72–3; 75.
R.V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1960) pp. 190–1; 473–4. Other historians mistakenly argue that it was Lenin’s second article ‘Better fewer, but better’, which the Politburo tried to suppress. Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, p. 88, Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 120; Carr, Interregnum, p. 273.
L.D. Trotsky, Zadachi XII s”ezda RKP(b) (M., 1923) pp. 26–36; 54–55.
See S. Lovell (ed.), Leon Trotsky Speaks (New York, 1972) pp. 155–8; 166.
E.F. Rozmirovich, V chem sushchnost’ reformy Rabkrina (M., 1923) p. 15.
Ikonnikov, Sozdanie i deyatel’nost’, p. 62 cites the unpublished thesis by F.I. Potashev, Obsuzhdenie predlozhenii V.I. Lenina ob ob”edinenii TsKK i RKI v period podgotovki i na XII s”ezde partii-Tezisy dokladov k nauchnoi konferentsii Rostovskoi vysshei partiinoi shkoly Oktyabr’ 1965 g, 1965, p. 51. See also Dvenadtsatyi s”ezd RKP(b), p. 886.
G.V. Kuibysheva et al., V.V. Kuibyshev (M., 1966) pp. 194–5; this commission included V.V. Kuibyshev, E.M. Yaroslavskii and N.M. Shvernik.
V.V. Kuibyshev, Zadachi TsKK i RKI (M., 1925) pp. 46–7.
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© 1987 E.A. Rees
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Rees, E.A. (1987). Lenin’s Plan for the Reorganization of Rabkrin (1922–3). In: State Control in Soviet Russia. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09299-4_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09299-4_3
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