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Building a Red Navy: Communist Activism and Military Authority in the Baltic Fleet, 1918–1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2021

Yiannis Kokosalakis Open the ORCID record for Yiannis Kokosalakis [Opens in a new window]
Yiannis Kokosalakis*
Affiliation:
School of History, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
*
i.kokosalakis@gmail.com
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Abstract

This article examines the activities of the Soviet military-political organs in the Baltic Fleet. It shows that the web of party institutions transformed the fleet into a space of political and social activism that had little to do with the strictly military aspects of government policy. Such activism was nevertheless unfailingly promoted, even as it became clear that it compromised core elements of military efficiency such as discipline and well-defined chains of command. This argument has implications for our broader understanding of the nature of the Soviet state. It indicates that once the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary ideology had become institutionalised in the state via the ubiquitous presence of party organs, pragmatic retreats for organisational efficiency became exceptionally difficult to implement.

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Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , May 2022 , pp. 214 - 226
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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12 Dekreti, 356; Zemtsov, Krasnie Komissari, 124.

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21 Von Hagen, 225.

22 Ibid., 214–20.

23 Ustav VKP (b), 1926; XII: 78.

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25 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1304, ll. 79–80.

26 Ibid. ll. 81–7.

27 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1310, l. 16–17.

28 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1303, l. 4.

29 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1303, l. 5.

30 RGAVFM, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1303, l. 183. The class background of senior officers made them attractive targets for the ever-suspicious secret police. This was often the source of tension with the military-political organs, whose officers naturally resented the usurpation of their powers of oversight by another bureaucracy. Aleksandr Zdanovich, Organi Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti i Krasnaia Armiia: Deiatel'nost’ Organov VChK – OGPU Po Obespecheniiu Bezopasnosti RKKA (1921–1934) (Moscow: Kuchkovo Pole, 2008).

31 In 1928, total party saturation in the Baltic Fleet was 20.3 per cent, or 4,506 communists out of a total of 21,654 servicemen. These were organised in twenty-seven unit-level organisations and 158 ship-department level cells. RGVAMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1334, 1. 55. During the same period, at Kronstadt, out of 591 party members, 479 were sailors and junior officers. RGVAMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1346, l. 6.

32 RGVAMF, r-34/2/1348/4.

33 At the same time, insufficient tickets to civilian cinemas at subsidised prices were amongst the common subjects of formal complaints. RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1307, ll. 3–5.

34 From 1926 to 1928 the number of voenkor circles jumped from eight to sixty, while the total membership increased almost tenfold from 128 to 1,137 – 38 per cent of whom were party members. In 1928, there were 179 different papers with a total circulation of 1,001 copies. RGVAMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1334, l. 66. For an account of the activities of their civilian counterparts, see Hicks, Jeremy, ‘Worker Correspondents: Between Journalism and Literature’, The Russian Review 66, 4 (2007), 568–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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36 KPSS, vol. 4, pp. 338–42.

37 For a conceptual treatment of samokritika, see David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 3. See also Clayton Black, ‘Answering for Bacchanalia: Management, Authority and the Putilov Tractor Program, 1928–1930’, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 1508 (2002) for an illuminative micro-historical account of how the campaign created a feedback loop between social tensions and political imperatives that precipitated a crisis in industrial relations.

38 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1365, ll. 1–2.

39 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1366, 1; RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1365, l. 3. Civilian communists from Leningrad's factories did come to assist the party purge in the fleet. S. Kostiuchenko et al., Istoriia Kirovskogo Zavoda (Moscow: Misl’, 1966), 299.

40 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1423, l. 6.

41 ‘Peasant moods’ were a much more common problem in the largely peasant army, leading Defence Commissar Kliment Voroshilov to forbid the involvement of military personnel in collectivisation. Roger R. Reese, ‘Red Army Opposition to Forced Collectivization, 1929–1930: The Army Wavers’, Slavic Review 55, (1996), 24–45.

42 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1423, l. 12

43 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1423, l. 13

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45 RGAVFM, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1423, l. 107.

46 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1423, l. 165.

47 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1423, ll. 175–179. Keek already had a reprimand and a strong reprimand for drunkenness, which presumably contributed to his expulsion.

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51 Pavel Petrov, ‘Krasnoznamennii Baltiiskii Flot Nakanune Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voini, 1935–Vesna 1940 Gg’ (Saint-Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskii Gosudarstvennii Universitet, 2014), 329.

52 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1443, ll. 9–10.

53 Peter Whitewood, The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 252–74.

54 See indicatively Fitzpatrick, Sheila, ‘How the Mice Buried the Cat: Scenes from the Great Purges of 1937 in the Russian Provinces’, Russian Review 52, 3 (1993), 299–320CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goldman, Wendy Z., Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

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56 RGAVMF, f. r-34, op. 2, d. 1443, l. 24.

57 On the 1930s democracy campaigns, see Getty, J. Arch, ‘State and Society Under Stalin: Constitutions and Elections in the 1930s’, Slavic Review 50, 1 (1991), 18–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lomb, Stalin's Constitution.

58 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 21, d. 2703, l. 5.

59 RGAVMF, f. r-852, op. 6, d. 24, ll. 117, 123.

60 RGAVMF, f. r-852, op. 8, d. 19, ll. 11–12.

61 RGAVMF, f. r-852, op. 8, d. 19, ll. 33.

62 Reese, Soviet Military Experience, 86.

63 Some figures bring the replacement rates of the fleet's formation commanders to 62 per cent, 32 per cent for surface vessels, and 55 per cent for submarines. Petrov, ‘Krasnoznamennii’, 336–9.

64 Ibid., 347–8.

65 RGAVMF, f. r-852, op. 5, d. 15, ll. 1–3.

66 RGAVMF, f. r-852, op. 5, d. 15, l. 42.

67 RGAVMF, f. r-1893, op. 1, d. 39, l. 9, 44, 124.