Practicing Stalinism by Getty J. Arch

Author:Getty, J. Arch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2013-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

KPK official Akulinushkin of Ukraine reported to a KPK plenum on the bartering system that characterized the work of virtually all economic agencies: “They even swap in the Vinitsa provincial party committee cafeteria.” One state farm director had sold 450 of the farm’s pigs independently:

Where did the money go? It went to the state farm. It doesn’t matter where the money went, but rather who gave the director the right to sell 450 of the state’s pigs? When we [the KPK] examined the case, it turned out that the District Party Committee, the District Soviet, and the district prosecutor had received pigs from the state farm, and everybody was happy.22

In Smolensk, the two poles of competing authority were Western Obkom First Secretary Ivan Petrovich Rumiantsev and KPK Plenipotentiary to the Western Oblast Leonid Andreevich Paparde. Both were powerful officials, but their jobs, politics, and ultimately their personalities were quite different.

Rumiantsev of Smolensk was a typical provincial party noble. A distinguished Old Bolshevik of proletarian stock, he was a metalworker who had joined the party in 1905. A knight of the revolution, he was a longtime TsK member and had ruled the Smolensk region since 1929 with a personal touch. In the region of Smolensk, factories, enterprises, and one entire district were named for him. Large photographs of him and his assistants appeared frequently in the press, and his birthday sparked a two-day celebration complete with congratulatory messages from common folk and adulatory telegrams from his underlings. His good-natured but efficient rule was regularly emphasized. The democratic-minded Rumiantsev invited ordinary workers to dine at his home, where they were allowed to use the good crystal. In the speeches of his minions, Rumiantsev was “the best Bolshevik in the region.”23 As a privileged member of the national party elite he received Politburo appropriations of valuable American dollars to fund his vacations abroad.24

In 1935, Leonid Andreevich Paparde was appointed plenipotentiary of the KPK to the Western Region. Before that, he had worked in Siberia as chairman of the Western Siberian TsKK (1932–34) and KPK plenipotentiary in Sverdlovsk (1934–35). Like his predecessor in Smolensk (Ian Bauer), and like so many officials in police and other control agencies, Paparde was not a Russian. Son of a Latvian peasant, he was one of the early members of the Latvian Social Democratic Party, which he joined in 1911 with party card number 124. He was a combat veteran of the Civil War, during which he received the Order of the Red Banner on the Kolchak Front.25 Two years before he came to Smolensk, he had written a pamphlet that explicitly blamed local party leaders for using their influence and “familyness” to protect their own. He was the perfect “king’s man.”26

For a Rumiantsev to show results, he needed tremendous authority; but having that authority put him in a position of relative independence from Moscow.27 Stalin needed the Rumiantsevs, but at the same time feared and resented the power they deployed locally and the loose way they did business. Local misconduct and disobedience of central directives were endemic.

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