ABSTRACT
Communists who had joined the party during the civil war returned to
Moscow in 1920 to begin peacetime construction, which many of them saw
as an extension of the military struggle. They had high hopes about the new
society they would build, and often reacted angrily to manifestations of
authoritarianism and hierarchy back in the capital, and in particular to any
evidence of material privilege among the new elite. The party they had
joined was volatile, in contrast to the sullen organization it became after the
tenth congress, when dissent was discouraged. The democratic centralist (DC) group, which had in 1919 won a majority for its policy of dispersing
decision-making power down through the soviets, was joined in opposition
by the Workers Opposition (WO). In Moscow, support for these and other
dissident groupings brought the party organization close to a split. The
numerical predominance in the party of the civil war communists, i.e. those
who joined during the civil war, was illustrated by a survey of the Moscow
regional party’s 35,226 members in October 1920. It showed that 32 per cent of
them had joined between the October revolution and August 1919, and another 51 per cent since then, mainly in the ‘party week’ recruitment drive of
October 1919. Only a tiny minority (5 per cent, i.e. 1763 members), had joined
the party before 1917, and another 10 per cent had joined in 1917 before
October. The party was, literally, steeled in battle: nationally, 89 per cent of the
membership was male, and of those, 70 per cent had completed military
training, ‘the majority in combatant units’. Many had just returned from, or
were between turns of duty at, the front. As Viktoriia Tiazhel’nikova has
shown, some persisted in their habit of carrying firearms when going about their office or factory jobs, not only in 1920 but for years afterwards.1 The transfer
of communists into administration, a tendency that continued into the mid
1920s, had begun: 27 per cent of the Moscow region’s members were working
1 Sekretariat TsK RKP(b), Materialy po statistike lichnogo sostava RKP, Moscow, 1921, pp. IX and 62-63; V.S. Tiazhel’nikova, ‘‘‘Voennyi sindrom’’ v povedenii kommunistov 1920-kh gg.’, in E.S. Seniavskaia (ed.), Voenno-istoricheskaia antropologiia. Ezhegodnik 2002. Predmet, zadachi, perspektivu razvitiia, Moscow: Rosspen, 2002, pp. 291-305.
