University Press.
The Soviet leadership used several organizations to ensure popular compliance with its policies, ideology, and morality. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Central Party Control Committee ensured Party discipline by verifying the thoughts and actions of Party members and candidates. Simultaneously, Rabkrin (the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate) used workers and peasants to supervise local administrators.
Josef Stalin gradually subordinated the Central Control Commission to the Party’s Central Committee and ultimately himself. In 1923 he merged it with the Workers and Peasant’s Inspectorate. From the beginning, the Central Control Commission was given a broad and vague mandate, allowing excesses and abuse of power. Not only did it investigate cases of poor work performance, failure to meet production quotas, corruption, or even drunkenness, but it found violations as needed when Stalin’s purges began during the 1930s.
As part of his de-Stalinization campaign following Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev announced he was going back to the party’s Leninist roots. While maintaining a tamer Party disciplinary structure, Khrushchev also recreated the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, now known as the Party-State Control Committee (PSCC). Using thousands of volunteers to supplement its small permanent staff, the PSCC was designed as more of a grassroots organization working to ensure fulfillment of the five-year plans. Instead of top-down
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surveillance, Khrushchev saw the Committees as a way of channeling factory-level information to top planners, such as hidden stockpiles of goods or resources.
Following Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964, the committee was renamed in December 1965, becoming the People’s Control Committee. It continued to rely on volunteers-about ten million in 1980-to monitor government and economic activities. In addition, the Committee’s chair, Alexander Shelepin, was removed, as Party leaders feared he held too many powerful posts at once. He was succeeded by Pavel Kovanov, who was replaced by Gennadiy Ivanovich Voronov in 1971. Voronov was replaced in 1974 by Alexei Shkolnikov.
Following his election as general secretary in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev began to restructure the PCC in accordance with his overall reform program. He appointed Sergei Manykin to chair the PCC in March 1987. Among the changes ordered was to reduce the number of inspections, because they were disruptive and actually contributed to inefficiency. In 1989 the organization was reconfigured as the USSR People’s Control Committee under the newly constituted USSR Supreme Soviet. Professional staff replaced the volunteers. In June 1989, Manyakin was replaced by Gennady Kolbin, who launched an ambitious program to link inspection reports to proposed legislation in the Supreme Soviet. Kolbin also sought to ensure that punishments were actually implemented, not overturned by appeals to a party patron. See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; DE-STALINIZATION; PERESTROIKA; PURGES, THE GREAT; RABKRIN.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adams, Jan S. (1978). “Institutional Change in the 1970s: The Case of the USSR People’s Control Committee.” Slavic Review 37(3):457-472. Adams, Jan S. (1989). “USSR People’s Control Committee and Perestroika.” Radio Liberty Report on the USSR 1(4):1-3.
(Narodnye doma), cultural-educational centers for the working classes that usually contained a reading room, lecture hall, tea room, and theater. The movement to construct people’s houses or people’s palaces with cultural and educational facilities for the working classes began in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century and soon spread to Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Austria, and other countries.
In Russia the first people’s houses were built by the semiofficial Guardianships of Popular Temperance, which operated under the auspices of the Finance Ministry. During the 1890s the Russian Finance Ministry began introducing a state liquor monopoly to regulate liquor sales and increase state revenues. The Ministry set up local Guardianships of Popular Temperance to monitor adherence to the liquor laws. The Guardianships were also instructed to encourage moderate drinking habits among the population by disseminating information on the dangers of excessive drinking, providing facilities for the treatment of alcoholism, and organizing “rational recreations” as an alternative to the tavern.
By the early 1900s the Guardianships of Popular Temperance were running people’s houses in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and other cities. St. Petersburg’s imposing Emperor Nicholas II People’s House was the largest recreational facility in the Russian Empire. It contained a dining hall, tea room, lending library, reading rooms, an observatory, a clinic for the treatment of alcoholics, a museum devoted to alcoholism, a cinema, a 1,500-seat theater, and an opera house. Besides performances of drama and opera, the Nicholas II People’s House organized scientific and religious lectures, evening adult classes, gymnastic exercises, classes in choral singing and folk music, and activities for children. From 1900 to 1913 almost two million people annually attended the entertainments at the Nicholas II People’s House, which was famed for its spectacular productions of historical plays and fantasy extravaganzas. Leading actors and artists sometimes appeared on the stage of the Nicholas II People’s House, where Fyodor Shalyapin, Russia’s greatest opera singer, gave a free concert for workers in 1915.
Zemstvos, dumas, and literacy societies also constructed people’s houses throughout Russia. The Kharkov Literacy Society built a people’s house in 1903; the Moscow duma opened a municipal people’s house with a theater in 1904. The liberal philanthropist Countess Sofia Panina opened her Ligovsky People’s House in 1903 in a poor district of St. Petersburg; there workers could attend evening courses, and Pavel Gaideburov and Nadezhda
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Skarskaya ran a very successful theater. By 1913 there were at least 222 people’s houses in the Russian Empire. During World War I, when prohibition against alcohol was enacted, interest in people’s houses increased, but the Petrograd and Moscow dumas’ ambitious plans for extensive networks of people’s houses were never realized due to the financial strains of the war.
The Russian people’s houses primary aim was to promote sobriety among the lower classes by offering them “rational recreations” in the form of theater performances, lectures, reading rooms, excursions, and other sober pursuits. Although their impact on popular alcohol consumption is doubtful, the people’s houses did offer the common people modest educational opportunities and a diverse variety of affordable theatrical entertainments. After the October Revolution the people’s houses were reorganized under the Soviet regime as “palaces of culture” and workers’ clubs but continued many of the same activities as before. See also: ALCOHOLISM; ALCOHOL MONOPOLY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Swift, E. Anthony. (2002). Popular Theater and Society in Tsarist Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thurston, Gary. (1998). The Popular Theatre Movement in Russia, 1862-1919. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
The People’s Party of “Free Russia” (Narodnaya Par-tiya “Svobodnaya Rossiya,” or NPSR) has its origins in the democratic wing of the Communist Party, which formed in July 1991 into the Democratic Party of Communists of Russia (DPKR) as part of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Serving as its base was the group Communists for Democracy in the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) (the leader was Alexander Rutskoi, elected Russia’s vice president in June 1991), and the Democratic Movement of Communists (Vasily Lipitsky’s group). After the August 1991 putsch and the dissolution of the CPSU, the DPKR in its first congress was renamed the People’s Party of “Free Russia,” and was headed by Rutskoi and Lip-itsky. It flourished from 1991 to 1993, when it was considered a potential ruling party. Moving in March 1992 into constructive opposition to the course of the Boris Yeltsin-Yegor Gaidar administration, the NPSR reached an agreement with the Democratic Party of Russia, on the basis of which the bloc Civic Union was formed.
