“Since I’m a chekist, I can hoodwink the district party committee.”: how the district party first secretary and the district chief of state security quarreled with one another (Smolensk region, 1945 - 1946)

The article resorts to unique and hitherto unknown documents of the Bolshevik Party Regional Committee to analyze the insufficiently researched topic of conflicts arising, developing and being resolved by key administrative figures of western agricultural regions of Soviet Russia in the 1940s. This complicated problem is examined in the context of the objective difficulties under which the administration of these agricultural areas had to function, such as economic ruin, the acute lack of financial and material resources, personnel shortage in district administration as well as an upsurge of anti-Soviet sentiment and collaborationism among the peasant population caused by a more or less lengthy occupation by Hitler’s troops. As a vivid illustration the author highlights the conflict between the First Secretary of the Bolshevik Party District Committee and the District Chief of State Security that arose in the Smolensk Region in the period of 1945- 1946. A special attention is paid to the causes of intra-apparatus conflicts, their mechanism, the methods of conducting an intra-apparatus struggle between rival parties, the population’s reception of the conflict between the district top administrators, methods of resolving the conflict and the role of the regional authority in settling the conflict. One of the author’s conclusions attributes the major cause of the conflicts to the very mechanism of administrating agricultural regions immediately after the Great Patriotic War, the wide-spread use of extreme methods for resolving economic, social, political and ideological problems. That explains why conflicts between the top officials of the Bolshevist Party District Committees and specific district institutions are part and parcel of the system and process of local government in the period of postwar Stalinism.