Campaign for inspection and exchange of party documents as a reflection of political technologies of Stalin's regime in the Upper Volga region in 1935-1936

This article is devoted to one of the most important administrative and political actions initiated by Stalin’s regime in the mid-1930s - campaigns on verification and exchange of party documents. The author made an attempt to examine the whole course of the campaign as much as possible in detail, from the preparation stage at the beginning of 1935 until its completion in the autumn of 1936 in a particular historical and geographical location - in the areas of the Upper Volga region. Documentary base of this research were, first of all, archival materials, introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. In this article series on the basis of the evidence the author reveals the following provisions. Firstly, investigation of party documents represented a large-scale ideological and political examination covering all regions - intra-party filtering of communists for “political reliability”. Secondly, the immediate aim of the campaign was to collect materials compromising the Communists and to make a list of the potentially repressed. One of the most important tools for carrying out the “ideological examination” of the Party and Soviet nomenclature used together with public security bodies in the territory of the Upper Volga region in the mid-1930s, was represented by the Party Control Commission (CPC) at the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) and its regional structure - Communist Party Collegium and later by the authorized representatives of the CPC of the Ivanovo and Yaroslavl regions. The author makes the general conclusion - campaign for the exchange and verification of party documents became the representative illustration of methodologically verified political technologies of the Stalin’s regime, as evidenced by its course: organization; full control by the center by means of directives; efficiency manifested in revealing “socially alien elements” recorded statistically for CPC line.