Projecting Bolshevik Unity, Ritualizing Party Debate: The Thirteenth Party Congress, 1924
Projecting Bolshevik Unity, Ritualizing Party Debate: The Thirteenth Party Congress, 1924

Summary/Abstract: In the history of the Bolshevik Party congress during the first decade of the Soviet regime, a notable shift in arranging the debate and organizing the extra-sessional activities arose at the Thirteenth Congress in May 1924. The Thirteenth Congress demonstrated few stirring debates on its floor, and the Politburo, in particular Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, established administrational and organizational mechanisms of control by which potential disquiet was prevented from arising at the plenary session. Archival materials show us, under the initiative of the troika, the nature of the Party congress was deliberately altered. Party discussion became of secondary importance and the troika extensively orchestrated the scenes of the Thirteenth Congress in order to display Party unity to the wider Soviet public. The formal appearance of the congress turned it into a site of Party propaganda and its practices and functions became very different from the congress when Lenin was alive. The previous studies are silent on the extra-curricular activities of the Thirteenth Congress but these activities constituted an important part of it especially as it was held so soon after Lenin’s death. The Thirteenth Congress, which staged mass parades in Red Square and arranged special extra-curricular activities for delegates, also marked a significant watershed in the development of the propagandistic aspects of the Bolshevik congress.124 The Party congress no longer operated as a forum for Party debate but became a showcase of Party unity. As inner-Party struggle intensified in subsequent years, the Party congress exercised these practices in an ever more comprehensive manner.

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