Party Building in Rural Areas of the Black Earth Region (1920s)

The process of party building in the 1920s reveals the patterns and course of the formation of the Stalinist dictatorship. The purpose of the article is to study the features of party building in the 1920s in a typical agrarian region of Russia – the Central Chernozem (Black Earth) region. This helps identify the internal mechanisms of the Soviet political regime, to show not only the implementation of the theoretical views of the communist leaders in the construction of Soviet statehood and in the life of Soviet society, but also to expand the understanding of Stalinism and the party-state apparatus of that time. Based on the analysis of printed party publications and unpublished archival sources, the article presents the state of rural partyorganizations, forms of party leadership, personnel policy in the party, and “painful” phenomena in the party. The growing number of communists in the Central Chernozem (Black Earth) region at the expense of poor peasants and collective farmers weakened the work of party organizations. In accordance with the policy of the central bodies of the Bolshevik Party, regional party committees solved the tasks of strengthening party unity and party discipline through the selection and transfer of personnel from one committee to another, instructing employees of party committees at the grassroots level, by increasing the secrecy of documents reflecting the leadership of ordinary Communists. The peculiatities of party work in a rural province were determined by the agrarian specifics of the region and the low educational and political level of peasant communists.