“‘Alien’ Personnel in the Soviet Revolutionary State: The People’s Commissariat of...

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"Alien" Personnel in the Soviet State: The People's Commissariat of Agriculture under Proletarian Dictatorship, 1918-1929 Author(s): James W. Heinzen Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 73-100Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2500656Accessed: 04-12-2015 13:21 UTC

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"Alien" Personnel in the Soviet State: The People's Commissariat of Agriculture under Proletarian Dictatorship, 1918-1929

James W. Heinzen

Land policy must be carried out by an apparatus that has not grasped the tasks and ideas of Soviet construction in the countryside and that is riddled with elements that are alien and even hostile to Soviet power.

-N. M. Shvernik, section chief, People's Commissar- iat of Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, 1924

"Anyone who reads the letters that passed between the Intendants and their superiors or subordinates," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, "cannot fail to be struck by the family likeness between the government officials of the past and those of modern France." He added that not only the personnel and institutions but even the internal bureaucratic termi- nology of the old regime was similar to that of postrevolutionary, re- publican France.' Despite their obsession with the French Revolution, Russia's revolutionary rulers had probably not read Tocqueville's cau- tionary tale about the persistence of the old-regime state. If they had, they might have learned quite a bit.

The sudden and unanticipated success of the 1917 October revolution posed a series of troubling questions for the newborn Bolshevik government. Two major, related personnel dilemmas loomed large for a party intent on establishing revolutionary institutions as vehicles for bringing its ideas to the peasantry: first, the social origins of its personnel; and second, the political reliability of that personnel. Who would build and staff the new state? Could the existing ministerial staffs be trusted? Members of which social groups belonged in specialist and administrative positions? In this article, I will discuss the extraordinary obstacles Soviet state builders faced in the years between 1917 and 1929 through the prism of one important agency, the People's Com- missariat of Agriculture (Narkomzem). Narkomzem had the crucial and

I would like to thank Rebecca Griffin, Michael Hickey, Peter Holquist, David Kerans, Stephen Kotkin, Moshe Lewin, Daniel Peris, the two anonymous readers for Slavic Review, and the members of the Delaware Valley Seminar on Russian History, especially the coordinator, Robert Weinberg, for their helpful comments on a draft of this paper. The International Research and Exchanges Board, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Study, and the Princeton University Committee for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences also provided funds to support this project. The epi- graph is taken from Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Ekonomiki (RGAE), f. 478, op. 1, d. 1534,11. 8-13 (Rabkrin report on investigation of Narkomzem staff).

1. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York, 1955), 61-63.

Slavic Review 56, no. 1 (Spring 1997)



74 Slavic Review

extremely ambitious mission of modernizing traditional, peasant agricultural production and implementing Soviet land policy in this enormous agrarian nation.2 This task of reshaping the economy, the political orientation, and the mentalities of the great majority of the population was a key component of Bolshevik efforts to extend the revolution to the countryside. A case study of Narkomzem is especially revealing because of the questions raised by the prominent position of politically suspect "bourgeois specialists" and former sympathizers of the Socialist Revolutionary party in central offices; and because of the communists' programs to recruit peasants into executive positions in Moscow and the provinces. Tracing the hurdles the organization encountered casts new light on the paradoxes of revolutionary institution building, the fragility of those organizations, and their suscep- tibility to attack by Stalinists at the end of the decade. What can the nature of the state and its cadres tell us about the stability of the Soviet state administrative systems that Stalin broke apart in 1929?

There are few social and political studies of the Soviet state (as opposed to the Communist Party) in Soviet or western historiography. Research on personnel who worked in the state bureaucracy has been especially rare. Historians have generally discussed the Soviet government as a collective without fully acknowledging that a multitude of individuals staffed it. An exception is Daniel Orlovsky, who has identified the "white-collar employees" (sluzhashchie) in the government apparatus as a crucial subject for understanding the processes of state and institution building during the New Economic Policy (NEP).3 He points out that western historians have generally followed their Soviet counterparts and assumed that the state in the 1920s was made up primarily of proletarians. Orlovsky adds that civil servants who were of neither worker nor peasant background had key roles "mediating" between the regime and the population.4

Some scholars have examined the state bureaucracy in the 1920s. Stephen Sternheimer has noted the important role that the Bolsheviks envisaged for the state administration from 1920 to 1930 as an "organizational weapon."5 Moshe Lewin, Roger Pethybridge, and

2. The terms land administration and agricultural administration are used inter- changeably in this article to refer to the Commissariat of Agriculture's network of central and local agencies.

3. See Daniel Orlovsky, "Gimpel'son and the Hegemony of the Working Class," Slavic Review 48, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 104-6; and Orlovsky's articles, "The Hidden Class: White-Collar Workers in the Soviet 1920s," in Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity (Ithaca, 1994), 220-52; and "State Building in the Civil War Era: The Role of the Lower Middle Strata," in Diane P. Koenker et al., eds., Party, State and Society in the Russian Civil War (Blooming- ton, 1989), 180-209. See also Don Karl Rowney's study of the formation of what he calls the "technocracy" in the late imperial and early Soviet periods, Transition to Technocracy: The Origins of the Soviet Administrative State (Ithaca, 1989).

4. Orlovsky, "Hidden Class," 244. 5. Stephen Sternheimer, "Administration for Development: The Emerging Bu-

reaucratic Elite, 1920-1930," in Don Karl Rowney and Walter M. Pintner, eds., Russian



"Alien" Personnel in the Soviet State 75

Sternheimer agree that the bureaucracy, including the administration outside the major urban centers, was a key tool in the communists' social and economic projects, and yet the administration was itself shaped by social forces at least partially out of its control.6 Lewis Sie- gelbaum, in his overview of the period from 1918 to 1929, points out that in some senses the state was weak.7 However, he does not fully explore the complexity of the tensions inherent in the staffing of revolutionary institutions with very large numbers of employees whom certain party leaders considered to be "unreliable," either socially or politically (or both) as a consequence of their prerevolutionary affiliations.

The evolution of tsarist administration in the last several decades of the old regime also provides us with a useful framework for con- ceptualizing the limitations of initial Soviet efforts at building a new state. The executive branch of the Soviet state, much like its tsarist precursors, was comprised of agencies that were responsible for par- ticular aspects of social and economic life. These commissariats were not completely isolated from society; instead they were rooted in those sectors of society that they dominated. State institutions, like all bureaucracies, had their own political interests and constituencies, shaped in part by their mission and their constituencies. Each agency created its own internal, cultural world that helped to mold its actions in the political world.8 Contemporaries called this vedomstvennost', a phenomenon by which the leaders of revolutionary state institutions, much to the chagrin of some party chiefs, acted in the interests of "their" organization, "their" staff, or "their" constituency, often ignoring or con- tradicting the instructions of their superiors.9

Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1980), 317-54. In this article, Sternheimer posed a still largely unanswered question that this article will address in part: "Who were the Soviet servitors of the 1920s? remains an important (and altogether neglected) area for empirical investigation" (319).

6. Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York, 1985); Roger Pethybridge, The Social Prelude to Stalinism (New York, 1974).

7. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918-1929 (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 3-5, 113-17. Siegelbaum also correctly asserts that "it would not do, however, to treat relations between the state and the intelligentsia in simple bipolar terms. The boundaries between the two were too fluid and divisions within each too severe to sustain such a framework" (115).

8. On the changing social composition in the Russian bureaucracy and its impact on ministerial politics of the autocracy, see especially AlfredJ. Rieber, "The Sedimen- tary Society," in Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identities in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, 1991); see also the articles in the Pintner and Rowney collection, Russian Officialdom; and Daniel T. Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of Internal Affairs in Imperial Russia, 1802-1881 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981); Richard Wortman, The Devel- opment of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago, 1976).

9. For a pioneering treatment of Bolshevik institutional and political culture, see Mark von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet



76 Slavic Review

A comparison of Soviet local government and tsarist administration can also be illuminating. Despite its reputation for stifling, over- weening bureaucracy, the tsarist state at the local level (like the Soviet state)10 was seriously "undergoverned," to use S. Frederick Starr's phrase.11 Richard Robbins, P. A. Zaionchkovskii, George Yaney, Nancy Frieden, and others have similarly emphasized the obstacles that tsarist officials confronted in both reaching and controlling the mass of the rural population.12 They also point to the concern in the tsarist and Soviet bureaucracies that the state could only poorly exercise control over the rural population and the larger fear that weak, underfunded, and isolated provincial administrations were a breeding ground for disloyalty, "localism," corruption, and other direct or indirect chal- lenges to central policies.13 Suspicion of the rapidly growing zemstvo "third element" voiced by tsarist ministers and local officials during the final several decades of the old regime was echoed by some Com- munist Party servitors in the 1920s in their growing anxiety about the inordinate influence of the increasing numbers of officials and specialists who were not members of the party in far-flung areas.14

Socialist State, 191 7-1930 (Ithaca, 1990). See also, for example, Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Ord- zhonikidze's Takeover of Vesenkha: A Case Study in Soviet Bureaucratic Politics," Soviet Studies 37, no. 2 (April 1985): 165-67.

10. Historians since E. H. Carr have noted the weakness of the Soviet state in the countryside. See, for example, his Socialism in One Country, 1924-1926, 2 vols. (New York, 1958-1960), 2:311-18.

11. S. Frederick Starr, Decentralization and Self-Government in Russia, 1830-1870 (Princeton, 1972). Ben Eklof has recently directed our attention to the fact that "underinstitutionalization" is a common thread linking the late tsarist and early Soviet periods. See Eklof, "The Inconsistency of NEP," in Theodore Taranovski, ed., Reform in Modern Russian History: Progress or Cycle? (Cambridge, Eng., 1995), 314.

12. P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Pravitel'stvennyi apparat samoderzhavnoi Rossii v XIX v. (Moscow, 1978); Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie v kontse XIX stoletiia: Politiches- kaia reaktsiia 80-kh-nachala 90-kh godov (Moscow, 1970); Richard Robbins, Famine in Russia, 1891-92: The Imperial Government Responds to a Crisis (New York, 1975); George Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861-1930 (Urbana, 1982); Nancy M. Frieden, "The Politics of Zemstvo Medicine," in Terence Emmons and Wayne S. Vucinich, eds., The Zemstvo in Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-Government (Cambridge, Eng., 1982).

13. On the underfunding of local governments compared with western Europe, see Michael F. Hamm, "The Breakdown of Urban Modernization: A Prelude to the Revolutions of 1917," in Hamm, ed., The City in Russian History (Lexington, Kent., 1976), 182-200.

14. On the third element, see Emmons and Vucinich eds., Zemstvo in Russia, especially the articles by Kermit E. McKenzie, "Zemstvo Organization and Role within the Administrative Structure"; Thomas Fallows, "The Zemstvo and the Bureaucracy, 1890-1904"; Robert E. Johnson, "Liberal Professionals and Professional Liberals: The Zemstvo Statisticians and Their Work"; Frieden, "Politics of Zemstvo Medicine"; and Terence Emmons, "The Zemstvo in Historical Perspective." Both a discussion of the functioning of these central and local agencies themselves and a full elucidation of how the Commissariat of Agriculture formulated land policy lie outside the parame- ters of this article. My work has investigated these issues in other places. See James W. Heinzen, "Politics, Administration and Specialization in the Russian People's Com- missariat of Agriculture, 1917-1927" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993).




In many ways the tsarist state was weak, administratively circum- scribed, and grossly understaffed and underfunded. Typical of many land empires, it neglected provincial administration and mistrusted its own personnel stationed outside the capitals. Nevertheless, the tsarist state had grandiose aspirations of effecting a social revolution that would strengthen Russia's geopolitical position. Far from being aban- doned, great power ambitions emerged even stronger in the new Soviet state, which also had an even more grandiose social modernization program. Having inherited much of the social structure, administrative personnel, and great power aspirations of old-regime Russia, the Soviet leadership dreamed, as Tocqueville wrote of the French revolutionaries, of making "use of the central power ... for shattering the whole social structure and rebuilding it on lines that seemed to them desirable." 15 Who were the state functionaries who would carry out such a project in rural Russia?

Amid the twin disasters of war and famine, reviving agricultural production presented a daunting challenge to the communist regime in the first years of the revolution. The recovery of the devastated agricultural sector was critical both for the nation's economic recovery and for establishing the basis for socialism in the countryside. A peace- ful relationship with the peasantry in the 1920s was crucial for the new regime's political stability. Agriculture remained the single largest sector of the national economy (more than 80 percent of the population were peasants according to the 1926 census) and the greatest contrib- utor to national income, still providing nearly double that of industry. In the 1920s, agriculture was the heart of the economy, around which the success of industrialization and indeed of the entire socialist project revolved. Narkomzem's mission was therefore central to the success of the regime. Narkomzem's claim to understand best this aspect of Soviet socioeconomic reality (while contested) was similar to declara- tions of other agencies- (like their prerevolutionary precursors) whether it was the Commissariat of Finance for tax and financial policy, Vesenkha (Supreme Council of the National Economy) for industrial development, the Commissariat of Ways of Communication for transportation, and so on. Indeed, the tsarist Ministry of Agriculture (known as GUZiZ before 1915) had also made claims to supremacy in the realm of land and agricultural modernization policy.

A vital aspect of the Commissariat of Agriculture's mission was the modernization of peasant farming. The commissariat's goal was to raise the productivity of the agricultural sector and ultimately to increase the amount of marketed produce. The surplus would be used to feed and supply the cities and the army and would be exported abroad for hard currency. Furthermore, the party also charged Narkomzem officials with helping to enlighten the "dark" and "backward" village. Nar- komzem's mission must be viewed within the framework of the tradi-

15. Tocqueville, Old Regime, 68.



78 Slavic Review

tional huge cultural gap between urban and rural Russia. In an address before a congress of land officials in 1926, Rykov, chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), noted both these goals- the economic and the sociocultural-when he congratulated his audience on making strides on the path toward "conquering ignorance and backwardness" in the countryside as "science enters every pore of our economy." With the help of the land administration, the socialist regime can "organize a human society in which there will be no poverty and no ignorance."1 6

To achieve these ends, Narkomzem established several thousand local branch offices from which agronomists, land reorganizers, and veterinarians traveled to villages to "try to find a common language" with villagers. Specialists mounted demonstrations, taught courses, gave lectures, and distributed literature about the most efficient farming techniques. The commissariat's land surveyors encouraged peasants to abandon "primitive" modes of traditional cultivation such as strip farming and the three-field system in favor of multifield crop rotation and other strategies of modern science. Though severely underfunded for most of the period discussed here, the commissariat's local branches distributed modern tools, quality seeds, and the occasional piece of machinery to farmers. The commissariat, then, had two missions inex- tricably linked to a desire to overcome the traditional underdevelop- ment of rural Russia: to lift total output and to educate the peasants about "rational" and "efficient" techniques. These tasks were made more difficult by the fact that Narkomzem's employees found the peasants to be recalcitrant, stubbornly devoted to their indigenous institutions, and resistant to Moscow's will to change them.

With more than 40,000 employees in central and local offices (not including another 40,000 or so forestry personnel), the People's Corni- missariat of Agriculture was the largest of the Soviet Union's thirteen commissariats by the mid-1920s.17 Most commissariats, by contrast, employed only between 4,000 and 12,000 people.18 By 1927, Narkomzem had grown to the point that it employed nearly one of every five employees in the commissarial bureaucracy.19 Although party inspectors attempted to reduce the size of some state agencies amid fears of a

16. Reported in Narkomzem's internal weekly, Sel'sko-khoziaistvennaia zhizn, 1926, no. 10:2-3.

17. Three major published sources are central to any social analysis of the Soviet state in the 1920s. The first is a 1922 survey of government employees, the results of which have been compiled by V. I. Vasiaev, V. Z. Drobizhev et al., Dannye perepisi sluzhashchikh 1922 goda o sostave kadrov Narkomatov RSFSR (Moscow, 1972). The second and third are the Central Statistical Administration (TsSU) and Gosplan surveys of the state and cooperative apparatuses: Tsentral'noe Statisticheskoe Upravlenie SSSR, Gosudarstvennyi apparat SSSR, 1924-1928 gg. (Moscow, 1929); and la. M. Bineman and S. Kheinman, Kadry gosudarstvennogo i kooperativnogo apparata SSSR (Moscow, 1930).

18. Tsentral'noe Statisticheskoe Upravlenie SSSR, Gosudarstvennyi apparat SSSR, 28. Vesenkha and the Central Statistical Administration also had the status of commissariats; each was about a quarter the size of Narkomzem. The finance commissariat was slightly smaller than Narkomzem, having suffered severe cutbacks after 1926.

19. Tsentral'noe Statisticheskoe Upravlenie SSSR, Gosudarstvennyi apparat SSSR, table 3, p. 12.




ballooning bureaucracy in the late 1920s, Narkomzem continued to grow as a consequence of the regime's intensified determination to resolve the "agrarian problem." This expansion was manifested in the creation of a sprawling network of local agronomic, veterinary, and land reorganization stations. From 1925 to 1928, in the midst of anti- bureaucratic campaigns, the land administration managed to grow by more than 6,600 people. This was by far the largest increase of any commissariat during the period. While the staff of the commissarial system as a whole shrank by 10 percent, the contingent of people involved in land work increased by almost 19 percent.20

Who, then, were the personnel of the Commissariat of Agriculture, the people the party charged with guiding the peasantry into a new era?21 Moshe Lewin and Teodor Shanin have highlighted the difficul- ties of the Soviet use of class categories when discussing the peasantry.22 Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown how the use of such categories as peasant, worker, and white-collar worker (sluzhashchii) were ascribed in a politicized and complicated way by government statisticians and investigators. The mutual incompatibility of Marxist class categories and preexisting estate (soslovie) categories obviously complicated matters. In the confusion of "classlessness" that followed the civil war, the communists felt an urgent need to "reclass" society, in part as a way of distinguishing between revolutionary allies and counterrevolution- ary foes.23

The party ideal, of course, was a state institution with most directors and specialists from the "new ruling class," the proletariat or the

20. See Tsentral'noe Statisticheskoe Upravlenie SSSR, Gosudarstvennyi apparat SSSR, 16, for an accounting of the staffs of each commissariat in these years.

21. When determining a person's social class preparatory to giving that individual a position in the apparat, the communists were generally most concerned with one's proiskhozhdenie, or social origin, which meant parents' background as of 1917. Some- times statisticians also used the category "social situation" (polozhenie), which defined a person's social position or occupation in 1917, or, if a party member, when one joined the party. In any case, the imprecision of these categories cautions one to take these figures as approximations, rather than as precise numbers.

22. Moshe Lewin in Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization (New York, 1968) and his essay "Who Was the Soviet Kulak?" in Making of the Soviet System, and Teodor Shanin, The Awkward Class. Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Devel- oping Society: Russia, 1910-1925 (Oxford, 1972). Narkomzem's party leadership and non- party specialists avoided employing the kulak-seredniak-bedniak categories that many party leaders used in discussing the countryside. The commissariat's policy of focusing its educational and modernization efforts on the most progressive stratum of the village population acted as a disincentive to stigmatizing the better-off peasantry. In statistical compilations of local cadres, they often simply used the category "peasant." Before 1927, Narkomzem downplayed the differentiation in the village that so obsessed many party observers watching for evidence of class struggle in the countryside. Like rightists in the party, they rarely used the derogatory and explosive term kulak.

23. Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia," Journal of Modern History 65 (December 1993): 745-70. It is not within the scope of the articles of Lewin, Shanin, and Fitzpatrick, however, to show how this occurred in practice, nor do they outline tactical struggles within and among institutions over these categories. On the "declassing" phenomenon, see also Lewin, "Len- inism and Bolshevism," in Making of the Soviet System.



80 Slavic Review

poor peasantry, the groups most privileged in communist ideology and hiring practices.24 Lenin's vision, set out in State and Revolution, of con- structing a state staffed (or at least supervised) by the laboring urban and rural masses clashed with the reality that nearly the only people qualified to work in economic administrations were members of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia and white-collar professions, many of whom were former tsarist officials called "holdovers." Especially in light of the devastation of the working class in the world war and the civil war, this desperate need for trained personnel meant that few (if any) agencies could come close to fulfilling the goal of extensive representation in responsible positions by the working masses.

Commissariat of Agriculture officials constantly complained that there were too few officials available who possessed any knowledge of agriculture to fill the needs of the new bureaucracy. This shortage of human resources is the fundamental reason why so many holdovers from the Provisional and imperial governments were hired temporarily (it was hoped) to fill the gap while "Red specialists" could be trained. Narkomzem's leadership was never satisfied with the quantity of specialists in its administrations, despite its constant lobbying. To some extent the shortage of experts was a legacy of the small number of schools for training agrarian technicians in the imperial period. By the eve of the revolution, only 15,000 state employees in the agriculture sector possessed a higher or secondary education.25 That number dropped sharply after 1917, due to the huge losses caused by emigra- tion, deaths from a variety of causes during the civil war, the disruption of education between 1914 and 1921, and the refusal of many specialists to work for the Soviet regime. V. V. Osinskii, the deputy commissar of agriculture, complained at the Ninth Congress of Soviets in Decem- ber 1921 that the number of specialists in the Soviet Union was "entirely inadequate" to support a peasant population of around 100 million.26 By the commissariat's calculations, famine-plagued Sar- atov province alone suffered a shortage of some 6,000 experts. In its report to the Congress of Soviets of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) in 1924, Narkomzem showed that, depend- ing on the region, each of its agronomists was extraordinarily over- burdened, being responsible for between 5,500 and 13,000 farms; the average was 8,000 to 9,000.27 The situation improved little before collectivization.28

24. Statisticians generally considered landless rural laborers (batraki) to be proletarians.

25. N. P. Nosova, "Formirovanie kadrov spetsialistov sel'skogo khoziaistva v sovetskoi dokolkhoznoi derevne (1917-29)," in R. P. Tolmacheva, ed., Naselenie i trudovye resursy Ural'skoi sovetskoi derevni (Sverdlovsk, 1987), 6.

26. RSFSR, Narodnyi komissariat zemledeliia, Otchet Narodnogo komissariata zemledeliia RSFSR (IX Vserossiiskomu s'ezdu sovetov) za 1921 g. (Moscow, 1922), 28.

27. RSFSR, Narodnyi komissariat zemledeliia, Otchet Narodnogo komissariata zemledeliia RSFSR (XII Vserossiiskomu s'ezdu sovetov) za 1923-24 gg. (Moscow, 1925), 166. In 1927, there were only 18,500 agronomists in the entire USSR.

28. In 1928, the USSR's thirty agricultural vuzy (higher educational institutions) and five agricultural departments in universities could satisfy only 28 percent of Nar-




The staff of Narkomzem's Moscow offices was replete with holdovers. As a result of its highly technical assignments (and the fact that technical specialists remained the group of state servitors with the largest proportion of holdover personnel), the Commissariat of Agri- culture had more than its share of personnel with previous experience in the imperial civil service. According to a survey in late 1918, a full 57 percent of specialists working in the central Narkomzem apparatus in Moscow were holdovers. This figure remained essentially unchanged until the end of the civil war, declining slowly over the course of NEP.29

Narkomzem was not the only commissariat to retain a large number of holdovers. The commissariats of finance and justice, the military bureaucracy, and Vesenkha also followed this pattern. Most of the holdovers in Narkomzem had served in upper or middle positions in the tsarist or Provisional Government ministries of agriculture or food.30 Many of those employed in the Moscow offices were from the provincial zemstvo "third element": agronomists, land reorganizers (the two largest agricultural specialties), statisticians, or economists. By the early 1920s, the commissariat's officials included former White Army officers, gentry (dvoriane, both landed and nonlanded),3' priests and their children, and others who had been considered deadly enemies of the communist regime during the civil war but who possessed ur- gently needed work experience or expertise. To the inspectors in Rab- krin (the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate)-the state bureaucratic oversight organ-and Orgraspred-the Central Committee's appoint- ments and allocation agency-Narkomzem's numbers were conspicu- ous, at times scandalous, even in a state administration that was full of tsarist-era holdovers in professional positions.32 Both these agencies

komzem's demand for graduates. K XVI s"ezdu VKP(b) (Moscow 1930), 130. See also Sel{sko-khoziaistvennaia zhizn' 1927, no. 19:10.

29. RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 19,11. 1-9 (Narkomzem Collegium protocols); RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 1534.

30. For an overview of the phenomenon of bourgeois specialists in the state apparatus, "indispensable for the success of the regime," see Lewin, "Society, State and Ideology during the First Five Year Plan," and Lewin, "Leninism and Bolshevism," in Making of the Soviet System. See also E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923 (New York, 1952), 2:182-87; Socialism in One Country, 1:115-22, 379-81; and Carr and R. W. Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926-1929, 2 vols. (London, 1969-1971), 1:574-604. Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society, 54-61; Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Stalin and the Making of a New Elite, 1928-1939," in The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992), 149-70; Daniel Peris, "Commissars in Red Cassocks: Former Priests in the League of the Militant Godless," Slavic Review 54, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 340-64. For interesting conclusions based on a quantitative and structural analysis of several people's commissariats, see Rowney, Transition to Technocracy.

31. As late as 1924, 35 percent of the 66 people who comprised the top leadership group of Narkomzem were "from the gentry" (iz dvorian). Of these, 7 had been land- owners (pomeshchiki). RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 1534,1. 2ob.

32. The Orgotdel (the Organization and Instruction Department) and Uchraspred (Records and Assignment Department) merged in 1924 into Orgraspred, a very powerful department of the secretariat responsible for the direction of subordinate party organs and the allocation of personnel. See Bol'shevik, no. 8 (30 April 1928): 66-71. On Orgraspred, see Carr, Socialism in One Country, 2:203-5, and Carr and Davies, Foun- dations- of a Planned Economy, 2:123-26.



82 Slavic Review

charged that the commissariat's leadership was insufficiently attentive to staffing integrity, while constantly pressuring Narkomzem to remove holdovers on the basis of their perceived unreliability. It is in these agencies that we see the strongest reflection of the widespread belief in the party that one's past determined one's political outlook. Nar- komzem's party bosses strongly resisted this pressure.33

A vast majority of Narkomzem's staff were sluzhashchie by social origin. This term referred to white-collar workers or "employees," as the term is most often translated, many of whom had occupied administrative, scientific, and technical positions before the revolution. Or- lovsky has shown that the sluzhashchie played a crucial role in Soviet institution building in the early Soviet period. Many communists ques- tioned the loyalty of these white-collar employees, who were neither peasants nor workers. In 1924, of the leading officials and specialists who worked in the central offices of Narkomzem, 97 percent were sluzhashchie. This figure dropped to 87 percent in 1929 amid extensive programs to recruit representatives of the working classes into state administration.34 Most commissariats, it should be noted, contained between 70 and 80 percent sluzhashchie as late as 1929.

A subgroup of the holdovers (and not synonymous with the sluzhashchie) were the so-called bourgeois specialists, the technically educated experts whom most Soviet economic agencies inherited. Mikh- ail Mikhailovich Glukhov serves as an illustrative example of a leading Narkomzem official who had served for a long time in the tsarist Min- istry of Agriculture before choosing to work for the new regime. Glukhov began his career in 1903 as an assistant to a district zemstvo agronomist in Kazan'. After graduating with an advanced degree from a forestry institute, Glukhov joined the Ministry of Agriculture and worked there for five years, while simultaneously writing articles for scientific journals. He began work in Narkomzem in 1918 and from 1923 to 1928 was involved in its publishing house.35 A. V. Teitel"s career also illustrates this presence of the prerevolutionary third element at high levels of the Soviet commissariat.36 Employed in land administration for twenty years before the revolution, Teitel"s tenure included a fifteen-year stint as an agronomist in the Samara provincial zemstvo. When the zemstvos were liquidated in 1918, he transferred to the Bolshevized provincial land section. Teitel' never joined the Communist Party, yet in 1921 he became the head of the Central Land Administration (TsUZem), at that time the division of Narkomzem with

33. For details on long-running tensions between Rabkrin inspectors and Nar- komzem's party leadership over the question of the social origins and political reliability of Narkomzem's personnel, see Heinzen, "Politics," chap. 5.

34. Bineman and Kheinman, Kadry gosudarstvennogo apparata, 24. 35. SelUsko-khoziaistvennaia zhizn', 1928, no. 4:10. 36. For a biographical sketch on the occasion of Teitel"s thirtieth year in land

work, see Sel'sko-khoziaistvennaia zhizn', 1928, no. 46:11. In 1930, Teitel' was arrested as part of the so-called Laboring Peasant Party, together with A. V. Chaianov, N. D. Kondrat'ev, and other leading agricultural specialists.




the highest profile. In the fall of 1923, Teitel' became a member of Zemplan (Planovaia komissiia), the commissariat brain trust, where he stayed until the general expulsion of prominent specialists (at Rab- krin's initiative) on the eve of collectivization in 1928.

Administrators as well as specialists frequently had prior experience in prerevolutionary bureaucracy.37 Many former nobles and landed gentry took mid- or low-level positions in land administration, in part because they were in grave need of an income. A 1924 Rabkrin investigation turned up the fact that one senior bookkeeper in Nar- komzem's agricultural division was descended of noble parents, had graduated from a seminary, had had "important responsibilities in a religious institution," and had served as a vice director in the tsarist Ministry of Education.38 A deputy in the commissariat's Administra- tion of Land Reorganization had led a strike by Ministry of Agriculture personnel against the new Bolshevik government in 1917.

Like most other commissariats in the Soviet system, Narkomzem contained only a very small proportion of party members. Following the example of the Red Army, where party watchdogs closely observed former tsarist officers who had agreed to work for the communists during the civil war, communist leaders created a system of dual control in the economic commissariats. In agencies like Narkomzem, in which hundreds of specialists with technical expertise played key roles in formulating and carrying out state policy, communists were posted to monitor the experts for political obedience. Orgraspred made sure that communists occupied the key administrative positions, though it is clear that they often only nominally supervised the professionals under their watch. These posts were the so-called nomenklatura positions-members of the collegium (the commissar's advisory board comprised mostly of the heads of divisions and the top specialists) and the heads of the major administrative divisions. In the lower ranks, however, the situation was very different, especially among specialists. Con- sidering the virtual absence of party members with any knowledge of agriculture, as A. P. Smirnov, people's commissar of agriculture (1923-1928), asserted without a trace of irony in 1924, the idea of placing party members at the heads of these many smaller sections was "utopian."3 Noncommunist experts outnumbered communists by about ten to one throughout the 1920s. Even by the end of the decade, on the eve of collectivization, these percentages had changed little for the Moscow offices.40

37. In 1929, 24 percent of higher and mid-level officials at the okrug level and 27 percent at the oblast' level were holdovers. Bineman and Kheinman, Kadry gosudarstvennogo apparata, 28.

38. RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 1534,1. 7. 39. RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 1534,1. 6ob. 40. By 1921, the communist contingent was just 3 percent, approximately

the same figure as in 1918. Rossiiskii Tsentr Khraneniia i Izucheniia Dokumentov Noveishei Istorii (RTsKhIDNI), f. 17, op. 65, d. 175, 1. 48 (Correspondence between the Commissariat of Agriculture and the Communist Party fraction). One party in-



84 Slavic Review

The weak communist presence stemmed in part from the vigorous actions of People's Commissar Smirnov. Smirnov, a Central Committee member and old Bolshevik, insisted on accepting people to fill important posts only if they possessed relevant scientific or administrative skills. Few Communist Party candidates fit the profile. Smirnov fought hard for this principle, writing to the Central Control Commission that, despite his best efforts to locate specialists on agriculture within party ranks, very few existed.41 As a result, under Smirnov's supervision from January 1924 to January 1927 the communist contingent in the Central Commissariat of Agriculture actually decreased, albeit slightly, to just over 10 percent.42 Amid a renewed antibureaucracy campaign in the first half of 1927, representation jumped to 14.4 percent, still the lowest for any of the ten commissariats for which there is data.43

To contribute to the communists' concern over the relatively few party members in the state bureaucracies, numerous individuals who had been sympathetic to non-Bolshevik political parties were scattered throughout the state administration as late as 1929. Former Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), Mensheviks, and Kadets were especially prevalent in economic agencies such as Vesenkha, the industrial trusts, Gos- plan, and the commissariats of finance, internal trade, and agriculture. Former members of non-Bolshevik political parties were also influential in the Academy of Sciences, and they held high-profile positions on the editorial boards of prominent economic journals.44

Narkomzem had a reputation for harboring a significant contingent of former members of, or those sympathetic to, the Socialist Rev- olutionary party. It is certainly the case that in the 1920s a number of leading specialists in the Moscow commissariat had been prominent SRs or had identified with their policies before and during 1917. This is not surprising since the SRs controlled the Ministry of Agriculture and the Main Land Committee (and their local branches) under the

spector complained that when the commissariat was reorganized in 1923 into five large divisions, each of which oversaw ten or more subsections that concentrated on technical issues, most subsections were completely devoid of communists. T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917-1967 (Princeton, 1968), 420. On 1928-29, see Bineman and Kheinman, Kadry gosudarstvennogo apparata, 24.

41. RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 1810,11. 75-76 (Correspondence between Narkomzem and Central Committee, 1925).

42. This figure actually masks a small decline in communist representation between January 1924 and January 1927. Piatnadtsatyi s"ezd VKP(b), dekabr' 1927 goda, stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1961), 1:446-47.

43. Piatnadtsatyi s"ezd, 446-47. The commissariat with the highest proportion of communists, Narkomtrud, had 28 percent. Narkomtorg was close behind with 27.6 percent. At the Sixteenth Party Conference in April 1929, it was reported that 11.7 percent of all employees were communists. This figure jumped to 25 percent for those in administration. Shestnadtsataia konferentsiia VKP(b), aprel' 1929 goda: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1962), 458-59.

44. See Naum Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties: Names to Be Remembered (Cam- bridge, Eng., 1972).




Provisional Government.45 These state organs, then, had served as something of a magnet for intelligenty interested in resolving the persistent inequities and "backwardness" endemic to the Russian countryside. Many of these SRs either simply remained in their jobs during the civil war or rejoined state administration when it appeared that the communists had moved a long way toward accommodating SR policies in 1921-22. "Neo-narodnik" specialists with international rep- utations before the revolution who were willing to work for the Soviet government in the Commissariat of Agriculture in the 1920s included the scholars N. D. Kondrat'ev, A. V. Chaianov, N. P. Makarov, N. P. Oganovskii, A. N. Chelintsev, A. L. Vainshtein, and many others.

These "Narkomzem professors" were concentrated in the commissariat's most important divisions: Zemplan and the Village Economy Administration (Upravlenie sel'skim khoziaistvom).46 These sections were also in charge of creating Narkomzem's long-range plans and of designing land policy and programs. They were also responsible for overseeing the implementation of these programs. These divisions were the first to be reorganized (and their personnel fired) in late 1927 and 1928 when party policy shifted toward collectivization and the antibureaucracy campaign took on a more overtly class-based tone.47

A number of facts were of concern to the Bolsheviks. The Socialist Revolutionaries had won most of the peasant vote to the Constituent Assembly in national elections, had openly taken up arms against the Reds in the civil war, and, the communists believed, had encouraged peasant uprisings against the Soviet regime at least as late as 1921. In the summer of 1922, the regime put the SRs on trial. During the pro- ceedings, Kondrat'ev and several other leading Narkomzem specialists were arrested as they stepped out of a meeting of Zemplan.48 Arrests of specialists continued through the fall. After the intervention of Nar- komzem's party leadership, the GPU (Gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie, the successor to the Cheka) released most of them, though B. D. Brutskus was expelled from the country. By early 1923, the arrests had ended, and specialists were again aggressively sought out. In a 1923 letter to the Politburo, Feliks Dzerzhinskii opined that, based on his experience in the transport commissariat, those specialists who still remained in Russia after the war were "the worst, without initiative and without character.... They work [only] to survive." Fortunately,

45. See Yaney, Urge to Mobilize, on the Ministry of Agriculture under Stolypin and the Provisional Government.

46. One can compare Narkomzem, where the experts were frequently former SRs, with Vesenkha and Narkomfin, where former Mensheviks dominated. See N. V. Val- entinov, Nasledniki Lenina (Moscow, 1991), 132-38.

47. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 374, op. 27, d. 702, for Rabkrin's efforts to reorganize Narkomzem in 1927-28 (Rabkrin investigation of Narkomzem party cell, 1925-27).

48. On the arrest of Zemplan specialists, see, for example, RGAE, f. 478, op. 2, d. 168,1. 55, 116 (Zemplan materials).



86 Slavic Review

he went on, "not a few" specialists who had fled to Berlin were eager to come back to the RSFSR.49 The GPU in concert with the economic commissariats tried to attract emigre specialists back to the USSR. By 1923, these specialists enjoyed a great deal of authority and autonomy in Narkomzem (as in other economic commissariats), and this situation persisted until the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan.

It is important to underline that there is no evidence that former SRs posed a real threat to Soviet power in the 1920s. Narkomzem's communist leadership believed that the SRs' contribution to creating policy in Moscow (and implementing it locally) was more valuable than their former political affiliations. The commissariat's leaders were therefore willing to disregard previous allegiances and support former SRs as politically loyal.50

Partly because of the presence of a sizable number of former SR sympathizers in leading roles, many in the party believed that Nar- komzem was excessively pro-peasant during the 1920s. Narkomzem had many enemies in the 1920s. The commissariat's "rightist" policies-lobbying for easy credit for farmers and relatively high purchase prices for agricultural produce, while encouraging production by "better-off" (zazhitochnye) or "strong" (krepkie) farmers through various legislation, including the legalization of the leasing of land and the hiring of labor-left it open to charges that these specialists were in- fluencing Narkomzem too far in the direction of concessions to the peasantry (especially the wealthier strata) at the expense of the proletariat. Narkomzem's persistent claim that social differentiation in the countryside was not a serious problem made it vulnerable to these accusations. Further, the policy of modernizing the commune by ap- plying intensive production methods (especially crop rotation) brought charges of a neo-narodnik bias. Narkomzem's leading specialist and communist leadership argued that there was no real kulak threat in the 1920s. The state's policies, they argued, should be aimed at villagers who were sober and hardworking but who, unlike the kulaks, did not exploit their neighbors. This "wager on the strong" was linked to Nar- komzem's neo-narodnik, bourgeois specialists by Trotskyists and

49. RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 370,11. 12-13 (Politburo protocols, 9 August 1923). The famous agricultural specialists N. P. Makarov and A. N. Chelintsev were persuaded to return in 1925. For the controversy that erupted around their return, see Heinzen, "Politics," chap. 5.

50. For a characterization by an unknown Narkomzem superior (probably I. A. Teodorovich) of N. D. Kondrat'ev as "formerly an active and political worker of SR inclination who has moved away from this inclination and is politically completely reliable" that is located in the files of the commissariat's personnel department, see RGAE, f. 478, op. 12, d. 957, 1. 34 (Characteristics of personnel, 1922-23). In the same report, N. P. Oganovskii is characterized as politically completely loyal, but as having earlier possessed a "purely narodnik ideology." On the "crimes" of Kondrat'ev, A. V. Chaianov, and others arrested in the so-called Laboring Peasant Party affair, see Kon- drat'evshchina, Chaianovshchina i Sukhanovshchina: Vreditel'stvo v sel'skom khoziaistve (Mos- cow, 1930); and Kondrat'evshchina: Bor'ba za kadry (Moscow, 1931).




Agrarian Marxists, and by 1928 and 1929 by Stalin and his supporters in the battle against the Right Opposition.

Faced with all these holdovers, sluzhashchie, and other politically suspect individuals, Sovnarkom ordered all commissariats to make vigorous efforts to dilute their ranks with industrial workers and, especially, with communists of working-class origin.5' Narkomzem and the party leadership hoped to train large numbers of workers to take up the slack and to staff high-level posts in the central administrations. But there were serious (though not unexpected) problems. The working class had been decimated during World War I and the civil war. The subsequent partial deurbanization of the cities as workers mi- grated back to the countryside resulted in a Communist Party that ruled in the name of a class greatly weakened and reduced by war. In late 1918, fewer than 2 percent of Narkomzem's personnel had been workers in 1917. Most other commissariats employed more workers, though only slightly more. The number of workers in the Commissariat of Agriculture climbed only very slowly during the 1920s. In fact, a 1924 report by Rabkrin showed that, excluding lower service and sec- retarial personnel, Narkomzem employed twice as many former gentry and nobles as workers and peasants combined.52 Despite extensive efforts to bring working-class party members into responsible positions in the Commissariat of Agriculture, the number of working-class officials remained low, reaching only 4 percent by 1927.53

It is not surprising that working-class representation remained so flat in the Commissariat of Agriculture. Narkomzem's culture, interests, and corporate identity, so obviously associated with the agrarian experts and the peasantry, would not have attracted factory workers looking for a job in an agency in the worker's state. Workers were more inclined to seek employment among their peers in a Communist Party, trade union, or industrial bureaucracy than in this specialized economic commissariat, with a culture that favored a powerful contingent of "experts." Narkomzem's policies, which openly favored the peasantry, would also have given many workers pause. Moreover, the reigning Bolshevik political culture reinforced the notion that an up- and-coming young proletarian party member should avoid accepting employment in an agency like the Commissariat of Agriculture, which was tainted by its close association with the "petty bourgeois" peasantry and clearly dominated by a specialist and peasant orientation.

51. The definition and usage of the category "worker" for "peasant" in the 1920s is, of course, problematic. Although there is not space to treat this issue in detail here, I wish to emphasize the regime's persistent concern that "workers," and especially "workers from the bench," be employed throughout the state apparatus. For more, see, for example, David L. Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929-1941 (Ithaca, 1994), and Carr, Socialism in One Country, 1:89-94.

52. RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 1534,1. 4. 53. RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 74, d. 18, 1. 9 (1930 report on agricultural cadres by

allocation department of the Central Committee).



88 Slavic Review

In an autobiographical statement written upon graduation from the Timiriazev Agricultural Academy, V. N. Khlebnikov, a party member of working-class origin, was explicit about the party's perception that it was odd for a person like himself to have chosen to pursue a career in agriculture. He explained that the catastrophic famine of 1921-22 had inspired him to lend his efforts to uplifting "primitive" farming methods. Nevertheless, he acknowledged, "It might seem strange that the son of a worker would enter the agricultural department of the university."54 Such a statement illustrates both the dominant political culture and the broad cultural gap that many workers sensed between themselves and the village population. By 1929, in the midst of intensive efforts to "proletarianize" the state apparatus, fewer than one out of ten employees at Narkomzem met the ideal of a worker background. What workers there were served almost exclusively in auxiliary positions.55 Given these factors, it is clear why throughout the period of NEP, the worker contingent at Narkomzem remained among the smallest of any commissariat.56

Narkomzem's leadership and the agencies overseeing its recruitment of personnel aspired less to attract workers than to recruit peasants, the group that Narkomzem was supposed to be serving. Once again, this process of promoting peasants has been much less studied by historians than similar programs to bring in workers. Communist leaders cited several reasons for increasing the number of staff of peasant origin in the commissariat. First, they were eventually to replace the old specialists and administrators who continued to dominate the state apparatus numerically.57 Second, Lenin wanted farmers in Nar- komzem both for their intimate knowledge of conditions in the village and for their symbolic importance in establishing the smychka.58 Farm-

54. RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 69, d. 230, 1. 52 (On assigning communist-students who have graduated from Timiriazev Academy, 1926).

55. RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 2087,1. 17 (Report of People's Commissar Kubiak). N. P. Nosova's assertion that "proletarians" and "peasants" played an important role in building the commissariat in the 1920s is clearly an exaggeration, informed by official histories of the state and Communist Party. Nosova, "Formirovanie," 8. See E. G. Gimpel'son, Rabochii klass v upravlenii Sovetskim gosudarstvom: Noiabr' 1917-1920 gg. (Moscow, 1982) for assertions similar to Nosova's that plagued the work of Soviet historians on revolutionary state building. See also Orlovsky's comments in "Gim- pel'son and the Hegemony of the Working Class."

56. RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 74, d. 18. In October 1929, 11.9 percent of all employees in the people's commissariats were former workers and 4.5 percent were children of workers. That proportion rose somewhat at the highest levels of the hierarchy.

57. A Central Committee circular clearly sent to calm local party leaders eager to purge old specialists urged them not to fire holdovers before new cadres could be trained. "The cohort of red specialists and administrators is inconsiderable at present. Their preparation is a matter that will take a long time. Only by preparing our own specialists from among workers and peasants can we replace the alien elements in the state apparatus." RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 469, pt. 22 and d. 480, pt. 26 (Politburo protocols and supplement, 1924).

58. RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 84, d. 252,1. 4 (Central Committee materials on Nar- komzem).



'Alien" Personnel in the Soviet State 89

ers brought to Moscow to take up responsible posts would serve as living representatives of the political and economic "alliance" with or "link" between the revolutionary workers' state and the peasantry upon which NEP was officially based. By including villagers in central and local administration, the traditional chasm between urban and rural Russia could begin to be bridged. Third, Lenin believed that increasing peasant and worker representation in the state apparatus would reduce bureaucratism. Lenin ascribed the red tape, delays, and other forms of "bureaucratism" to the mentality of holdover tsarist chinovniki. He anticipated that diluting these old attitudes with fresh blood from the laboring classes would begin to revitalize Soviet administration.

Together with Lenin, the party leadership of the agriculture commissariat hoped that the highly visible presence of the muzhik would demonstrate to the rural masses that their interests were represented at the highest levels of the proletarian dictatorship.59 Narkomzem launched a program to bring in vydvizhentsy or "promotees," that is, peasants "from the plow" who had ideally not yet broken their ties with farming. They were then given jobs at the commissariat's central Moscow offices. Other commissariats undertook their own programs.60 It is clear from the archive materials that Narkomzem was at best a grudging partner in the party's plans to recruit peasants into the Mos- cow offices of the commissariat.61 Narkomzem was forced to recruit peasants from the plow as the ideological equivalent of promoting "workers from the bench."62

Throughout the 1920s, however, people of peasant origin were just as scarce as workers in the Moscow offices of Narkomzem, despite these noisy recruitment campaigns. Although peasant representation in the land departments rose sharply in the provinces beginning in 1923, as will be shown below, this did not occur at the center. Narkomzem faced special pressure on this front. Although no commissariat drew more than 10 percent of its staff from among people of peasant origin, the number of peasant promotees in the Commissariat of Agriculture remained quite low, even in comparison with their presence in commissariats that had little contact with matters concerning the village.63 Indeed, as late as 1927, only five peasant promotees were transferred

59. RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 69, d. 171 (Central Committee statistics on cadres). This file contains a complaint that the commissariat's report on cadres does not provide a plan for increasing its peasant contingent despite the low number of peasants in comparison with other commissariats. On Lenin, see Leninskii sbornik (Moscow, 1959), 36:163 and 35:228.

60. Pethybridge, Social Prelude to Stalinism, 274. 61. See, for example, GARF, f. 374, op. 28, d. 3061,1. 16 (Rabkrin materials on

vydvizhenie). 62. On cultural conflicts that resulted from the promotion of peasants into Nar-

komzem in the 1920s, see my unpublished paper given at the 1995 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, "Peasants into Bureau- crats? The Recruitment and Promotion of 'Peasants from the Plow' into Central Administration, 1921-1929."

63. Bineman and Kheinman, Kadry gosudarstvennogo apparata, 30.



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to Moscow (in a central organization with approximately 3,000 people), and just six followed the next year, despite intense pressure on Nar- komzem by party inspectors.

A countervailing trend throughout the 1920s was the party's effort to improve and reduce the size of the state bureaucracy, which was growing at an alarming rate.65 The campaigns against the bureaucracy entered a new stage in 1926. As part of "the regime of economy" campaign, staffs of the people's commissariats were slashed, as were expenditures. Calls were made to improve the low cultural level of Soviet administrators, echoing the complaints in Lenin's last articles. There was much agitation about "bringing the masses into the campaign." The 1928 Shakhty Affair intensified pressure to replace bourgeois specialists and holdovers with recruits from the masses. The drive to remove "alien elements" progressed throughout 1928, when Stalin- ists tied them with the "Right Deviationists," who were more likely to oppose rapid industrialization plans. Attempts in 1928 and 1929 to curb the growth of the bureaucracy also backfired. Programs to reduce cadres and costs almost always resulted in expansions of cost and personnel. Many fired personnel simply found new jobs somewhere else in the apparatus, or even in a different department of the same agency.66

From its creation in 1917 until Stalin rendered it impotent in De- cember 1929 by launching the attack on the "agrarian front," the Mos- cow headquarters of the Commissariat of Agriculture (along with the equally suspect Commissariat of Finance) always ranked among the state agencies with the lowest proportion of Communist Party members, the smallest percentage of personnel from the laboring classes, and the highest number of holdovers and "bourgeois specialists" among its central staff. In the midst of antibureaucracy campaigns that had increasingly begun to focus on the presence of class "aliens" by 1927, Narkomzem received more attention from party inspectors than most commissariats, since it was listed at, or close to, the bottom in these categories (together with the Commissariat of Finance), and since its mission was so central to the success of the economic recovery and the construction of socialism in an agrarian Soviet Union.67

64. The extensive recruitment programs of 1929 resulted in only eighteen new peasants in the central offices. RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 74, d. 18,11. 5-9. There were only ten promotees in the oblast' apparatus in 1929. Bineman and Kheinman, Kadry gosudarstvennogo apparata, 27.

65. See Daniel T. Orlovsky, "The Anti-Bureaucratic Campaigns of the 1920's," in Theodore Taranovski, ed., Reform in Modern Russian History (Washington, D.C., 1995), 290-310; also Carr, Socialism in One Country, 1:117-19; and Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 2:291-311.

66. Lewin, "Society, State and Ideology," 209-40. 67. Rabkrin, Uchraspred, Orgotdel, and Orgraspred all berated the commissar-

iat's leadership about the deficiencies in personnel between 1921-1929. See Heinzen, "Politics," chap. 5.




The close physical proximity of the commissariat's local personnel to the peasantry caused party zealots even more apprehension, especially in light of the communists' negligible presence in the provinces. No group of state officials enjoyed closer contact with the peasant population than those who worked for Narkomzem, with the possible exception of schoolteachers. Although the state presence was nowhere strong in rural Russia before collectivization, the commissariat's agronomic, veterinary, land reorganization, and other roving specialist personnel had a closer relationship to the peasantry than any other group of civil servants. Thus, while the composition of the Moscow offices was worrisome, if tolerable for the short-term, its local cadres took on an appearance that diverged so starkly from the ideal that they were a prime target for Moscow watchdogs.

It was not the holdovers in the capital that most captured the attention of those concerned about the potentially unreliable nature of the apparatus; more anxiety was generated by the high percentage of holdovers in the periphery, where Soviet power had been much slower to set down roots.68 The statistics paint an impressive picture. By 1923, a full six years after the revolution, and following two years of almost unrestricted hiring based less on loyalty to Soviet power than on requisite education or previous experience, the proportion of specialists who were holdovers had actually increased, to 63 percent.69 In 1923, among the country's 15,000 agricultural specialists, the average length of service was eleven years.70 As of 1926, about 60 percent of local (uchastkovye) agronomists had worked in tsarist land administration, and 40 percent of this group had worked for five years or longer before the revolution.71 Indeed, local party officials frequently complained about the political untrustworthiness-either genuine or, more often, potential-of specialist personnel, particularly those with the greatest contact with the villages. As a report of the Penza provincial land administration put it in 1925, "The shortage of specialists in general for work in the land organs and the weak preparation of the majority of the current contingent of specialists, especially those working in the localities, has raised the question of the political complexion of all specialists working in land organs."72

68. Merle Fainsod noted "the extreme weakness of the Party" in the Smolensk countryside. Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (New York, 1963), 44.

69. Spravochnik o spetsialistakh seltskogo khoziaistva SSSR (Moscow-Leningrad, 1924), 73. At the beginning of 1923, the Main Bureau of Technical Forces in the Commissariat of Labor undertook the re-registration of all agricultural specialists. For the first time the executive organs of the party and state as well as Narkomzem had at least a general picture of who worked in land administration.

70. Spravochnik o spetsialistakh, 73. A small number of these holdovers were peasants who had moved into the civil administration between 1905 and 1917.

71. RSFSR, Narodnyi komissariat zemledeliia, Otchet Narodnogo komissariata zemledeliia RSFSR za 1924-25 gg. (Moscow, 1926), 577.

72. RGAE, f. 478, op. 3, d. 2979,1. 48 (Quarterly and monthly reports of provincial land departments).



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As one TsSU (Central Statistical Administration) report noted in 1929, the small percentage of party members and the large numbers of holdovers among local specialists

forces one to think carefully. The agencies of Narkomzem, which come into direct contact with the broad mass of peasants, are located in the politically most responsible sectors. They implement the most important directives of the party, but are nonetheless still very strongly choked with employees upon whom the legacy of the tsarist regime still weighs very heavily.73

The weak communist presence was particularly striking with regard to local specialists. At the district level in 1929 fewer than one in thirty of the 14,000 agricultural specialists were party members.74 Yet these agronomists, veterinarians, and land surveyors lived and worked in close contact with the farming population. The commissariat's non- party influence in the village was thus potentially quite prominent, especially when combined with evidence that few party instructors paid visits to the countryside. By the eve of the collectivization offen- sive, central inspectors were expressing considerable concern about the growing political role of agricultural specialists in the village.

Those Communist Party members who did work in the system of land administration became the frequent targets of complaints by professional specialists who resented the heavy-handed attempts to control their activity by party leaders who were often wholly ignorant of agriculture.75 Most of the communists employed in Narkomzem had very little education. In 1926, 78 percent of all Communist Party members who worked in the state bureaucracy had no more than a primary education.76 In the fall of 1929 a certain Martynov spoke out on this problem at a conference of land officials: "We must say in all candor that the majority of party comrades in the land apparatus, beginning with the leadership and ending with the personnel of the lowest land agencies, are agronomically illiterate. Therefore, the challenge of im- proving the agronomic literacy of land workers who are party members confronts Narkomzem. And this must be done beginning with the lead-

73. Bineman and Kheinman, Kadry gosudarstvennogo apparata, 23, 26. These statisticians worried that the "mentalities" of two-thirds or even three-quarters of Nar- komzem employees were formed before 1917. The age of state functionaries was indeed a common concern among inspectors.

74. This was the case despite a doubling of the employees who served in Nar- komzem's okrug and district bureaucracies between 1926 and 1928. Tsentral'noe Sta- tisticheskoe Upravlenie SSSR, Gosudarstvennyi apparat SSSR, 28. Within the entire So- viet state bureaucracy, only 9.4 percent of specialists at the okrug level were party members.

75. On friction between experts and party members in the industrial economy, see Kendall Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917-1941 (Princeton, 1978).

76. Vsesoiuznaia kommunisticheskaia partiia, tsentral'nyi komitet, Statisticheskii otdel, Kommunisty v sostave apparata gosuchrezhdenii i obshchestvennykh organizatsii: Itogi vsesoiuznoi partiinoi perepisi 1927 goda (Moscow, 1929), table 15.




ership contingent."77 At the same conference in the fall of 1929, A. M. Dmitriev, the chairman of Sovkhoztsentr, developed this theme of the ignorant, meddlesome party administrator in conflict with the specialist: "How do they choose [communist] personnel for the land administration? In our opinion, [they think] that land policy can be carried out by anyone who has simply driven through the countryside. ... We have to work with people who often do not know the difference between rye and wheat."78

More than the relatively few (if inordinately influential) former SR sympathizers in Moscow, it was the SR presence in the localities that most worried party watchdogs. These communists were aware that, at various times over the course of the decade, certain pressing issues- especially taxation, drought, famine, high prices for industrial goods, and the perception of preferences for industrial workers-angered the peasants and raised the specter of massive rural discontent. Some communists suspected-and these fears were clearly exaggerated-that local land administrations were an ideal forum from which SRs could covertly urge the peasantry, or certain strata within it, to resist Soviet power.79

Because of the chaotic state of record keeping and communication during the civil war, it is very difficult to ascertain just who comprised the local land administrations from 1918 to 1921. But in the early to mid-1920s, many complaints surfaced of a significant SR presence in the local land administrations, especially in the central agricultural, Volga, and southeast regions. Local communists feared that agricultural specialists whose declared political affiliation was "non-party" were in fact SR sympathizers. Applicants and employees clearly avoided revealing such sympathies when investigators made inquiries. In a secret 1922 memorandum, a district Communist Party committee complained to the Penza provincial cell that land policy was being carried out with "a so-called 'non-party' SR current .... The chief of the district land department was the SR Iumaev. Until very recently, the chief of the land reorganization section was the 'non-party' man Samoskin, who during 1918 was the chair of the district executive committee from the SR faction; the current chief of the district land department is the 'non-party' agronomist Fenin, earlier officially counted among the SRs, and who is even now leading a campaign against the communists."80 Reports from the secret police continued to discuss purported SR ac-

77. SelUsko-khoziaistvennaia zhizn', 1929, no. 38:18. 78. Sel{sko-khoziaistvennaia zhizn' 1929, no. 38:18-19. 79. For example, a number of Narkomzem officials were arrested in 1921 for

encouraging the peasant uprisings centered in Tambov and known as the "Antonov- shchina." RGAE, f. 478, op. 12. The Smolensk archive also records police concern about purported SR activities in the 1920s. Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule, 44.

80. Partiinyi arkhiv Penzenskoi oblasti (PAPO), f. 36, op. 1, d. 416,1. 79 (Protocols and materials of the Fourteenth Penza Provincial Party Conference, 1-4 October 1922). Support for the SRs had been strong in Penza during the civil war.



94 Slavic Review

tivity well into the 1920s.81 A 1926 GPU report at a closed session of the Penza provincial party cell warned of the possibility of terror by SRs and members of other parties.82

Other evidence exists of disquiet about a pervasive SR presence. In 1929 a provocative secret report was written by N. A. Kubiak, then people's commissar of agriculture for the RSFSR.83 He wrote that as late as 1928, up to 60 percent of the leadership contingent of the krai and oblast' branches of Narkomzem had come from other parties, primarily the SRs.84 One must put Kubiak's accusation in the context of the heated political atmosphere of 1929, when party ideologues were launching witch-hunts and spreading charges of disloyalty against byvshie liudi ("former people," or people of the bourgeois or aristocratic classes tainted by association with the old regime). Although Kubiak's assertion may be an exaggeration, it lends credence to the notion that the Commissariat of Agriculture had earned a reputation for sheltering persons with noncommunist and even anticommunist inclinations. Be- yond this, it starkly illustrates the exaggerated fears about SRs that were prevalent among some communists.

Why were so many SRs willing to work for the communists, and why did the Narkomzem leadership tolerate them? In the context of Narkomzem's expanded mission during NEP, three related explana- tions should be considered. First, and quite simply, from 1921 to 1928 or so the communists' policies toward the peasantry harmonized very closely with SR land policy. Significant areas of overlap included the emphasis on cooperatives, the free selling of surpluses, the encourage- ment of increased production within the commune, and the general neglect of collective farms and sovkhozy. Many SRs believed that the communists were conceding that the SRs had been correct all along, at least with regard to land policy. In addition, because 1917 had seen the dominance of rural soviets by SRs, and the Provisional Govern- ment's Ministry of Agriculture had been controlled by the SRs, the expansion of the local agronomic aid network at the beginning of NEP naturally attracted many administrators and experts who sympathized with the party that had been prominent in land affairs during 1917.

81. For the years through 1922, the reports are located in the Lenin fond (fond 2) of RTsKhIDNI.

82. PAPO, f. 36, op. 1, d. 1138,1. 37 (Protocols of secret session of the biuro and secretariat of the Penza provincial committee of VKP[b], 1926).

83. RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 2087,1. 18. 84. By leadership cadres, Kubiak means the chiefs of the agricultural, land re-

organization, veterinary, and forest sections within land departments. The 60 percent figure seems high, and Kubiak may have been motivated to exaggerate by the atmosphere at the end of the decade (which often targeted the Commissariat of Agriculture) or by other political reasons. In the same spirit, P. Lezhnev-Finkovskii, the head of Narkomzem's section for agronomic assistance, noted at a 1929 conference that many unsuitable people were being sent to work in the land administration, including many who had been members of other parties. At the same meeting, a comrade Tutskii maintained that in the land bureaucracy a large percentage of employees were former SRs. Sel {sko-khoziaistvennaia zhizn', 1929, no. 38:18.




Second, a flood of administrative and specialist personnel looking for jobs poured into the land administration and its local agencies immediately after the conclusion of the civil war in late 1920 and early 1921. This helps to explain the large quantity, not just of SRs, but also of holdover personnel from tsarist administrations. Once hostilities had ended and NEP had been introduced, Narkomzem and its local branches, desperate for individuals knowledgeable about agricultural matters, appear to have hired almost anyone who applied. Committees responsible for verifying credentials frequently did background checks only several months after an individual was hired, if at all.85 NEP policies explicitly rejected the violence, coercion, and extreme central- ization that had guided economic life during the period of war com- munism (1918-21) while simultaneously encouraging a shift toward more widespread use of experts in local and national economic agencies. The sudden reorientation away from a wartime policy of forced confiscation of food surpluses to one of appeasing a dissatisfied and potentially rebellious countryside forced Sovnarkom and the party to allow Narkomzem to hire specialists and administrators with little regard for past political orientation. Attempts to make accurate background checks were complicated by the poor record keeping that stemmed from the general postwar confusion. There was no reliable way to verify the political sympathies of the new recruits. Almost all prospective employees listed their political affiliation as "non-party" on job applications, and there was no mechanism for checking the veracity of these claims. Chiefs of local land administrations were rarely inclined to spend time checking applicants' political credentials in the face of pressure to set up aid and educational programs. Local land administrations had their hands full verifying educational qualifications, which presumably were much easier to check than soslovie or political background.86

Finally, the horrific famine of 1921-22, in which several million villagers died, also prompted an explosion in hiring of people who claimed even the slightest knowledge of agriculture. During this eighteen-month period beginning at the end of 1920, Narkomzem's offices ballooned in size as personnel were pressed into service to com- bat the effects of the famine.

Soviet rural administration reflected a persistent dilemma of local power in Russia. Land administration, dominated by non-party specialists, was strong in comparison to the party presence in the countryside. This is reminiscent of the "third element" agricultural experts.

85. In 1924, Rabkrin criticized Narkomzem's "completely unsystematic" proce- dures for hiring and checking backgrounds. This created a "favorable soil for the penetration of the apparatus by alien elements." RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 1534, 1. 10. For a 1927 comment by the chief of Uchraspred's Narkomzem office complaining that many applicants had already started work by the time he had finished his background check, see GARF, f. 374, op. 27, d. 702, 1. 55.

86. E. Ostovskii, "Pereproizvodstvo agrospetsialistov ili neratsional'noe ikh ispol'zovanie," Seltsko-khoziaistvennaia zhizn' 1927, no. 46:26-27.



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The third element's proximity to the peasantry and simultaneous lack of supervision led many tsarist bureaucrats to treat zemstvo professionals with suspicion, regarding them as little more than a necessary evil.87 In the 1920s, local specialists certainly had more contact with the local population than members of most rural party cells, who were, quite literally, few and far between and rarely ventured into the village. At the same time, specialists were frequently mistrusted by local party officials.

The large cohort of holdovers and bourgeois specialists, the pre- ponderance of sluzhashchie, the troubling presence of former SR sympathizers, the small proportion of workers-in each of these aspects the local situation mirrored the central. But it was in the local land administrations that the social revolution found its real reflection, as the revolutionary state met rural Russia.88 In contrast to the scant presence of peasants in the offices of the Moscow commissariat, the number of people of peasant descent who served in local land administration- in provinces, uezds, and offices of the local agronomic and land reorganization networks-increased sharply over the course of the 1920s.89 In 1923, a systematic program to attract peasants began, especially those "from the plow,"90 but also people who were peasants by birth but had subsequently moved away from the countryside.91 In 1925, 361 "actively farming peasants" were brought into leadership positions in provincial, uezd, and okrug rungs of the land apparatus.92 About 30 percent were fired within a year, for "failing to show the proper interest in their work" or for "lacking initiative." Nevertheless, by the following year, nearly three-quarters of the chiefs of district land sections had worked the land as peasants before October.93 Peas-

87. To some local councilors, as Kimitaka Matsuzato has pointed out, the word agronomist was synonymous with "anti-Christ, rebel and plotter." Matsuzato, "The Fate of Agronomists in Russia: Their Quantitative Dynamics from 1911 to 1916," Russian Review 55, no. 2 (April 1996): 182.

88. As Rowney points out, peasants found more opportunities for upward mobility in the civil administration than in the Communist Party. By 1929, only 13.7 percent of party members who held white-collar positions were peasants, while workers made up 43 percent. By contrast, peasants comprised 30 percent of all civilian officials in the commissarial bureaucracy, reaching 34 percent at local levels (oblast', okrug, and raion); workers held only about 19 percent of the positions. Sluzhashchie remained the single largest category. Rowney, Transition to Technocracy, 156-59.

89. On peasants in local administration, see Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, 119-26; Shanin, Awkward Class, 163-66.

90. RSFSR, Narodnyi komissariat zemledeliia, Otchet Narodnogo komissariata zemledeliia RSFSR za 1924-25 gg., 575.

91. RSFSR, Narodnyi komissariat zemledeliia, Otchet Narodnogo komissariata zemledeliia RSFSR (XII Vserossiiskomu s"ezdu sovetov) za 1923-24 gg., 586.

92. RSFSR, Narodnyi komissariat zemledeliia, Otchet Narodnogo komissariata zemledeliia RSFSR za 1924-25 gg., 575 (based on information from 40 provinces). Of these peasants, 91 percent had some kind of obshchestvennyi stazh.

93. RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 2087,1. 17. RSFSR, Narodnyi komissariat zemledeliia, Otchet Narodnogo komissariata zemledeliia RSFSR za 1924-25 gg., 581. A typographical error in the table lists "GZU" where it should read "UZU."




ants were also highly represented among their deputies.94 Many specialists were from the peasantry as well. About a quarter of all 16,000 agricultural specialists surveyed were either "peasants or children of peasants" in 1929.95 Of specialists in the agronomic, land reorganization, and veterinarian assistance networks-that is, the most grassroots of all the agricultural assistance administration-53 percent were "from the peasantry" as of 1929.96 Land administration in revolutionary Rus- sia was therefore excellent for the career prospects of ambitious villagers.

What was a desirable and necessary step in the view of communist leaders for building bridges to the rural masses also had certain unexpected ramifications. First was a sharp lowering of qualifications. In 1925, a full 96 percent of several hundred peasant recruits to leadership positions in the land administration had no more than a primary education. In 1926, among all chiefs of uezd land administrations, their deputies and assistants, almost three-quarters had only a primary education, and only 8 percent had special training of any kind.97 (At the same time, 60 percent of these barely educated administrators were members or candidates of the Communist Party, testimony to the level of illiteracy-political and otherwise-among rural party members).98 The situation in the provincial land administration was only slightly better. In October 1924, for example, officials with no more than a primary education held the three leading positions in the Penza provincial land administration-the chief, his deputy, and the head of the section in charge of finance and administration.99

Two reasons stand out for the growing numbers of villagers-and the falling levels of education-among those who held key posts in the local land administration. First, hiring them was yet another attempt to relieve the extreme shortage of experienced administrators and experts, by recruiting and training members of the laboring classes for jobs that, before the revolution, had been filled by people from the upper and middle classes. Second, it was difficult to convince highly qualified personnel, trained mostly in urban areas and often harboring traditional prejudices against the "darkness" and "backwardness" of village life, to move to the countryside. Even those who accepted such positions frequently hoped to flee rural areas quickly and return to a city (especially Moscow or Leningrad) where the pay, standard of liv-

94. See RSFSR, Narodnyi komissariat zemledeliia, Otchet Narodnogo komissariata zemledeliia RSFSR za 1924-25 gg., 581. Three-quarters of the peasant promotees for that period were not members of the party; 40 percent were listed as "poor peasants," and 60 percent as "middle peasants." Seltsko-khoziaistvennaia zhizn' 1926, no. 5:31.

95. Bineman and Kheinman, Kadry gosudarstvennogo apparata, 24. 96. RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 74, d. 18,1. 13. 97. RSFSR, Narodnyi komissariat zemledeliia, Otchet Narodnogo komissariata zem-

ledeliia RSFSR za 1924-25 gg., 582. 98. Ibid., 580. 99. RGAE, f. 478, op. 3, d. 2979,1. 8.



98 Slavic Review

ing, and working conditions were much better.100 An extraordinary turnover problem resulted. Training villagers to work in land sections, or even hiring them without training, must have seemed like a natural solution to this situation.

Thus, as NEP progressed, the Narkomzem apparatus remained highly specialized at the top levels, while gradually becoming "peas- antized" from below. The case of Narkomzem illustrates that the boundary between state and society, so starkly drawn along estate (soslovie) lines in pre-1917 administration, shifted and became less defined during the 1920s. At the same time, this boundary was becoming less defined as peasants themselves gained some specialized education and experience in administration and rose to executive positions inside the rural, if not the central, bureaucracy.

Once the course toward collectivization was set in 1929, however, peasants were among the first to be removed from local land administration. This occurred amid accusations that many farmer-officials were kulaks or seredniaks who, because of their loyalty to individual and communal farming, would try to sabotage a move toward socialist agriculture from within the government. Many in the party also came to believe that they brought lazy, undisciplined "peasant work habits" to the office and were therefore unprepared for the attack "on the agrarian front."101

By the end of the decade, the large numbers of specialists and administrative bosses from the peasantry were also labeled untrustworthy, since most were from middle peasant households. The party therefore considered them incapable of managing the collectivization process, being too wedded to individual farming. Thus, peasants as well as specialists were presumed to have retained their "harmful" prerevolutionary mentalities.

The Bolsheviks did not create a new state from scratch in October 1917; rather, they inherited one across the revolutionary divide. The leaders of the people's commissariats, from the party chiefs and their deputies to the heads of the specialized divisions, had to find qualified labor to staff revolutionary agencies. The great paradox-and this did not escape the Bolsheviks-is that they inherited a huge state administration populated by many people whom the Bolsheviks considered to be "class enemies." Yet these were the very people whom they des- perately needed to restore and maintain the economy and every state institution. To complicate matters, the government apparatus was enormous, growing, and nearly omnipresent.

Over the course of the 1920s, the commissariat's cadres remained decidedly nonproletarian and noncommunist in character. The people

100. For details on the abysmal working conditions of provincial officials, see Heinzen, "Politics," 203-21.

101. See, for example, RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 74, d. 18,11. 10-16. SelUsko-khoziaistvennaia zhizn, 1929, no. 38:18.




available to work in the government often appeared tainted in the eyes of party hard-liners who were extremely suspicious of many categories of employees on social or political grounds. Narkomzem's personnel were considered untrustworthy by virtue of having served in the tsarist civil service or having been supporters of the SRs.

By the late 1920s, then, land administration had deep roots in the Russian society with which it interacted. This was especially the case for the two "alien" groups, the specialists-many of whom were sluzhashchie and even holdovers from tsarist administration-and the peasants. Yet in the 1920s the party leaders needed the cooperation of both groups in order to preserve the revolution: the specialists for their indispensable expertise, and the peasants for the food and industrial raw materials that they produced. In fact, in the early 1920s Soviet civil administration served as something of a magnet for people regarded by hard-line communists as social and political "aliens" of all types. The state's unexpected need for their requisite skills meant that the directors of central and local agencies had to be less selective about prerevolutionary experience or political affiliations when hiring, especially when recruiting specialists. Throughout the 1920s, Nar- komzem's bosses also allowed local agencies to hire without regard for a potential employee's social affiliation or even prerevolutionary political loyalty. One could say that although certain party inspectors were obsessed with prerevolutionary social and political origins, Nar- komzem was obsessed with qualifications, with staffing its network of 3,000 branch offices and aid stations with people who had both education and experience. This was probably typical of many state agencies with assignments demanding technical expertise. Only in the context of the commissariat's urgent sense of mission, together with the shortage of people to fulfill this mission, can we understand Nar- komzem's efforts to staff its apparatus. This tolerance for those considered in some party circles to be social and political pariahs made Narkomzem an obvious target for the waves of purging that occurred in 1928-29.

Thus, in this important way, the state system was quite fragile and tension-filled during the 1920s, as the party pursued two, often con- flicting, goals: modernization and class politics. The unbalanced nature of the evolution of state building, with specialists, holdovers, and their party protectors on the one hand and hard-line party activists on the other, was a crucial reason for the demise of NEP. We must, of course, be cautious in generalizing about the entire state on the basis of one commissariat. Narkomzem, like all commissariats, had its own culture, interests, and political identity, which were in many ways incompatible with Stalinist plans. It is certainly clear, however, that the experience of the Commissariat of Agriculture can serve as an example of how the state apparatus served as a refuge for non-party scientific intelligentsia as well as professionals and administrators of all backgrounds, while also serving as a means of social mobility for the peasantry at the lower levels. Every commissariat contained people who, in the eyes



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of some party activists, were potentially disloyal and inherently unreliable by virtue of their social status or occupation before the revolution. Although the party could temporarily tolerate these skilled people until loyal "red specialists" could be trained, they had to be removed sooner or later. Since each commissariat was packed with such "alien" officials, each was increasingly vulnerable to attack. Furthermore, in light of the party's weakness in the countryside, some communists felt even more insecure with a local soviet system staffed by "untrustworthy" cadres. State officials who had extensive contact with the mass of peasants, themselves unpredictable and suspect, were of special concern. In the words of Ia. A. Iakovlev, deputy commissar of Rabkrin, at the Sixteenth Party Conference in April 1929:

In the USSR there is a gap between, on the one hand, the political and economic foundation of this country, and, on the other, the apparatus that implements these tasks.... We had to build our new apparatus to a significant degree using people who remained and whom we inherited with the old foundation. Many parts of our apparatus were transferred intact already. As a result of this we, as a Soviet country, have no guarantee that the decisions of the governing organs of the apparatus (to a large degree alien to us in terms of personnel) will really be implemented.102

By the end of the decade, suspicion grew about alien elements who, many in the party believed, might threaten the survival of the regime. The upheavals that we recognize as characteristic of 1929 took root in part a decade earlier in the labeling of most governmental employees as "hostile and alien elements" and in the subsequent instability of the immature administrative systems of the Soviet state. In this article, I have argued that the social composition of the state administration fueled a growing suspicion among Politburo members at the end of the decade that whole sections of the commissarial bureaucracy (and their local agencies) were completely unreliable and had to be circum- vented in the Soviet Great Leap Forward. To carry out crash collectivization, Stalinists denounced Narkomzem RSFSR as untrustworthy and created new central agencies. Armed gangs such as the 25,000-ers, the Red Army, and other extra-administrative "plenipotentiaries" traveled to the village and stayed, ignoring the established state structures with their cohort of "suspect" personnel. Narkomzem was simply by- passed, rendered powerless in the creation and implementation of rural policy.

102. Shestnadtsataia konferentsiia VKP(b), 445. The November 1929 Plenum of the Central Committee echoed this sentiment specifically with regard to agricultural workers. RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 74, d. 18,1. 2.



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