Party Crisis and the factory shop floor: Krasnyi Putilovets and the Leningrad opposition, 1925–26

Abstract

THE REVIVAL OF INTEREST in recent years in the New Economic Policy as a possible alternative to Stalinism has prompted a host of studies of the 1920s in Soviet history. This revival began at a time when a new generation of historians of all fields were paying special attention to issues of social class and less attention to the 'old school' subjects of politics and diplomacy. This discipline-wide trend, coupled with the gradual opening of access to materials in the Soviet Union, meant that the field of Soviet history saw a spurt of exciting new studies on workers, peasants and culture under the New Economic Policy (NEP), while our understanding of the politics of the period remained reliant on studies written in a time when sources were fewer and historians operated under different assumptions. As a result, we are only beginning to connect the work of social historians-work that provides a context for understanding the political turmoil of the 1920s-to the work of political studies and thereby to re-evaluate our views of this period as a whole. This article seeks to contribute to this re-evaluation by examining the episode of the Leningrad opposition and the XIV Congress as it affected the Krasnyi putilovets (Putilov) factory and its party organisation. Micro-level studies of such events suggest that the debates over the party's political and economic policies should not be seen merely as jockeying for power with the manipulation of marxist and leninist ideas. Rather, those debates reflected the strains affecting all levels of Soviet society in the 1920s as well as growing questions about the viability of the NEP and the future of the country's economic development. Recent studies by Merridale and Hatch have explored the broad social and economic factors that influenced high politics in NEP Russia.1 These studies show clearly that, although the Russian Communist Party was hardly democratic in the Western sense, the party's leaders were nevertheless affected by pressures from rank-and-file members. But whereas Merridale and Hatch have done much to reveal