Abstract
The purpose of the article is to use archival material collected in the archives of Orel, Voronezh, Omsk and Novosibirsk to reveal the role of party and Komsomol activists in the leadership of the OGPU bodies in the regions of Orel and Omsk. The comparative analysis showed that similar processes took place in the regions. The OGPU bodies were locally controlled by the party apparatus, but, in turn, they monitored the behavior of ordinary communists and Komsomol members, and in some cases during the period of party purges, the leading employees as well. In some cases, there was ‘linkage’ between the Chekist and the Party-Chekist leadership, which allowed to weaken the control of party bodies. In addition, from the mid-1920s the process of removing the OGPU from the local party bodies control was launched, which remained only for the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. This, according to the author of the article, contributed to the «great purge» of 1937.
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